Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

This was repairing a faulty transmission hub in one of the port-side conduit arrays, a repair made rather more than mundane due to the sudden nature of the fault’s occurrence and its location in a region of the ship that had suffered more than its fair share of malfunctions in recent times.

  ‘Because this is what we were assigned,’ said Casada, following a jumping, flickering noospheric map projected in the air before him. ‘Every duty in service of the Omnissiah is valued and important, from the lowliest to the–’

  ‘Spare us the motivational crap, magos,’ said Knox. ‘You got it because you’re new here and don’t kiss the right overseer’s arse. Anyone with a brain cell rattling around their skull avoids the lower decks. Too dark, too packed with machinery that can take your arm off, disembowel you or vaporise your bones to dust to be healthy.’

  ‘I heard these decks got irradiated when the Speranza threw her moorings at her launch,’ said Cavell.

  Casada knew he should quash their seditious talk, but there was truth to what they were saying and he was a firm believer in allowing those beneath you an awareness that you shared their concerns.

  ‘There’s a measure of truth to that,’ he allowed, taking a high-ceilinged transit passageway his map told him should lead to processional steps down to the conduit. ‘There are heightened radiation levels in the lower decks, yes, but nothing to give us undue concern; we’ll not be going down into the deeper regions of the ship.’

  ‘Just as bloody well,’ said Knox. ‘Ain’t nobody knows nothin’ of what’s down there nohow.’

  Forcing himself to ignore Knox’s murderous grammar, Casada said, ‘Correction: that just isn’t true. I have plentiful maps of the regions we must traverse to reach the transmission hub.’

  ‘You’re in the deeps now, magos, down past the waterline,’ said Knox. ‘Try navigating by those maps here and you’ll be lost like all them other crews that went down too far.’

  ‘Ah, gruesome tales of hauntings and disappearances in uncommon regions of a starship,’ said Casada. ‘I am familiar with such shipboard rumours and scare-stories. They are nothing but invented fantasies to explain away industrial accidents and fill lacunae of information. It is my contention that such tales are spread as a means of creating a unity of experience among the uninitiated.’

  ‘Shows what you know,’ said Cavell. ‘You’re new here, but you’ll learn.’

  ‘Or he won’t,’ said Knox, drawing a finger across his throat.

  Casada tried not to be put out by their obviously scaremongering behaviour, but it was true he was having a number of difficulties in following their assigned route. Access ports weren’t where they were supposed to be, corridors and companionways marked as passable were blocked by thrumming machinery or simply weren’t there. Thus far, his noospheric adaptations had found workarounds, but sooner or later Knox and Cavell were going to realise he wasn’t entirely sure where they were any more.

  ‘And what about them?’ asked Knox, jerking a thumb at the three servitors following mutely behind them. ‘How do we know they’re not going to murder us when we’re too deep to call for help?’

  Rumours of the incredible events in Feeding Hall Eighty-Six had circulated the various shifts throughout the ship, and despite the Mechanicus’ best efforts to quash their spread no one was looking at the servitors in quite the same light. That the instigators and their apparently autonomous servitor were said to have escaped Magos Saiixek’s skitarii and fled into the depths of the ship only added a level of revolutionary verisimilitude to the talk of holy presences.

  ‘These ones certainly appear to be appropriately servile,’ said Casada.

  ‘Yeah? Well perhaps that’s just to lull us into thinking they’re brain-dead cyborgs and not heartless killers that want revenge for being made into servitors,’ said Cavell.

  ‘Now you are being ridiculous,’ said Casada, frowning as they reached the end of the passageway to find the expected processional archway fringed with sparking cabling. A broken coolant pipe billowed hot steam and spilled a waterfall of scum-frothed water down the stairs. The effect was akin to a pict Casada had seen of a waterfall in a mangrove swamp, overhung by jungle creepers and humid with torpid vapour.

  ‘Down there?’ asked Knox, peering into the darkness where water-damaged lumens strobed and spat. ‘Tell me you’re joking.’

  Casada heard what sounded like heavy footfalls, but were most likely some deeper machinery echoing through the tunnels. Something scraped on metal, but in such unvisited regions of a ship as large as an Ark Mechanicus, that wouldn’t be unusual. A lack of regular maintenance would give rise to all manner of apparently inexplicable auditory peculiarities.

  Cavell ducked under a bundle of conjoined cabling, bending this way and that to get a better look at where it had been broken.

  ‘This ain’t right,’ he said, reaching up to touch the insulated sheath around the break point.

  ‘We have seen many such breakages,’ said Casada. ‘After the nightmarish crossing of the Halo Scar, many cable runs have snapped under increased tensile loads.’

  ‘No,’ said Knox. ‘He’s right, look. They’ve been cut. Deliberately.’

  Casada examined the cable run being held by Cavell, running a three-dimensional mapping laser over the damaged portion.

  ‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ said Cavell.

  ‘The separation appears to be clean,’ admitted Casada. ‘I see no evidence of the stresses and weakening of the insulation sheath I might expect from tear damage. It is impossible to be certain, but it appears that, yes, this cable has been cut. Who cut it and why is another matter entirely.’

  Even as he said the words, he knew he wasn’t being entirely truthful. The break in the cable was so precise, with so infinitesimal a deflection in the adjacent fibres, that there was little possibility it could have been achieved by any known device or blade.

  At least none known to the Mechanicus.

  Another booming echo sounded from below, that deeper, sub-deck machinery again, but when it came again, Casada realised it was closer than before. He looked down the processional stairs, but instead of flickering lumens, the wide stairwell was wreathed in impenetrable darkness.

  ‘Perhaps we should find another way down,’ said Casada, backing away from the steps.

  Knox looked up, picking up on his building anxiety.

  The man followed Casada’s gaze and his eyes widened in fear as something huge surged from the darkness below. Its elongated emerald skull was bulbous and glossy, its ivory limbs slender and grasping as it raced up the steps with a loping, horrifically organic gait.

  Whispering streams of displaced air scythed up the steps.

  Cavell simply vanished, his body coming apart so thoroughly it was as though he’d clutched an armed frag mine to his chest. Ruined body parts tumbled down the steps, and Knox set off at a sprint lest he suffer the same fate.

  He made three steps before he was felled by the towering, spindle-limbed construct. Its monstrous hand seemed to merely brush over the top of the man’s head, but the lid of his skull came away as surely as though a precision trepanning laser had sliced clean through it.

  The animal part of Casada’s brain howled in terror, flooding his body with adrenaline, and he screamed as he turned to run. He pushed past the unresisting servitors, fighting to escape, to get away from this below the waterline daemon of the dark. He risked a glance over his shoulder and let out a whimper of naked fear as he saw four porcelain-limbed figures with cherry red plumes streaming from their howling, death-mask faces.

  ‘How did–’ was all Casada managed before a shrieking wail buckled the air between him and his pursuers. His high-function aural implants blew out under the lethal sonic assault and blessed lubricant poured from his eyes and ears.

  Casada howled in pain as his optics fizzed with bleeding binary static and his skull filled with nerve-shredding feedback. Denied the heightened sensory input of his enhancing augmetics, Casada’s brain implants began rerou
ting his synaptic pathways to once again employ his birth-senses. Viewed through the obscuring lens of his blown implants, Casada’s natural vision was blurred and grainy with lack of use. He saw a wavering, smeared-lens image of the killers coming towards him and pushed himself to his feet. He knew he couldn’t escape, but ran anyway, his terror driving his limbs in a vain attempt to prolong his life. The after-effects of the mind-shredding scream still ravaged his body. Hideous nausea churned in his gut and a sickening vertigo made his lurching steps comically drunken.

  Casada couldn’t see where he was going, his unaugmented senses painfully blunted.

  He blundered into an iron wall, striking his head on a protruding flange and falling to his knees. Blood poured down his face from this latest indignity. He crawled like a beast on its belly, a wounded animal stalked by a predatory creature that revels in its prey’s suffering.

  Through his sobs he heard the unmistakable sounds of blades through flesh. One by one, the servitors he had led into the depths were butchered without resistance; beasts led blindly into the slaughterhouse.

  ‘Please,’ he begged, as he heard distorted echoes of footsteps behind him. ‘Please don’t kill me.’

  The tip of something dreadfully sharp pressed on the nape of his neck.

  ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus…’ he said, drawing his hands together beneath his body in the Cog Mechanicus. ‘The Machine-God is with me, I shall fear no evil…’

  A sharp thrust and the blade sliced cleanly through Casada’s spinal cord.

  The earlier mood of optimism that had suffused the expedition upon establishing the landing fields had evaporated utterly. A great many machines and lives had been lost on the plateau, and an atmosphere of shared contrition now filled the command deck of the Tabularium. Still clad in his gleaming armour, Kotov had gathered his commanders around Linya Tychon’s surveyor station. Each warrior and magos was studiously examining the hololithic projection of the Tomioka as it stubbornly refused to divulge its secrets to any of the available augurs.

  Kotov stared at the gently rotating image, as though he could simply will its interior structure to reveal itself by virtue of his vaunted rank.

  Ven Anders stood in the shadow of Sergeant Tanna and his white-wreathed Emperor’s Champion. Though Dahan’s losses currently stood at three hundred dead and fifty-seven injured, Tanna’s loss was perhaps the greater. Coming face to face with the Black Templars, Kotov had thought to berate them for their foolishness, but upon learning of Brother Auiden’s death, he had instead offered only sincere regrets. The loss of a single Space Marine was bad enough, but to lose an Apothecary was something else entirely and Kotov could clearly see Tanna’s need to atone for his misguided zeal.

  Azuramagelli and Kryptaestrex were plugged in on opposite sides of the plotting table, their petty bickering put aside in the face of this bloody setback. Galatea leaned over the surveyor station, its hand idly tracing the outline of the holographic starship.

  ‘It has been over four thousand years since we saw her. Many long years…’ said the hybrid construct, turning the rotating image back and forth with soft haptic gestures.

  Kotov felt a tremor of unease at Galatea’s behaviour; like it was reaching out to something familiar, like a long lost friend or a forbidden object of desire.

  ‘No-one has seen it in that long,’ said Kotov.

  Galatea’s head snapped up, and it snatched its hand back, as though caught in some forbidden act. The silver-eyed proxy body at the centre of its palanquin pulled back into itself.

  ‘You did not see it as we saw it,’ said Galatea. ‘That we can promise you. The greatest ship of its age, launched in glorious triumph, but mocked for daring to dream that the impossible could be within our grasp. You do not know, you cannot know, what that was like.’

  ‘You would be surprised,’ snapped Kotov, his own travails and losses having seen him set sail on this expedition under a similar cloud of criticism from his fellow Martian adepts. ‘But your recall of the Tomioka will have to wait, unless you have something useful to contribute?’

  ‘Like what lies inside,’ said Ven Anders. ‘That’s what I want to know. If we want to get inside that ship, then I want to know what my men are going to face.’

  The Cadian colonel’s close-cropped hair was sheened in perspiration, for the running-heat of so many cogitation engines made this chamber a hothouse for mortals.

  ‘We know no more than you, Colonel Anders,’ said Galatea.

  Anders ran a hand across his stubbled chin and said, ‘You know what? I don’t think I believe you. I think you know damn well what’s inside that ship, so how about you cut the crap and just tell us what you know.’

  Galatea spread its hands in an empty gesture of apology. ‘The same umbra that inhibits Mistress Tychon’s augurs prevent us from learning more than you already know.’

  Anders grunted in disbelief and shook his head. ‘You’re lying, and if any of my men die because of that, you have my word as an officer of Cadia that I’ll kill you.’

  Kotov placed both hands on the edge of the plotting table and said, ‘We must proceed on the assumption that we will encounter further automated defences within the Tomioka. Colonel Anders, Sergeant Tanna and Magos Dahan, you should prepare your assault plans on that supposition.’

  ‘The skitarii should have the honour of breaching the hull of a Mechanicus vessel,’ said Dahan, squaring his shoulders as if daring anyone to contradict him. Kotov understood Dahan’s grandstanding. His warriors had been humbled, and only the intervention of Legio Sirius’s war-engines had finally ended the battle.

  ‘My Templars are better suited to fighting in such environments,’ said Tanna. ‘We should be first.’

  ‘With all due respect,’ said Anders. ‘There’s only five of you, and that’s a pretty big ship.’

  ‘I could conquer a world with five Black Templars,’ said Tanna.

  Linya Tychon cut across the impending confrontation.

  ‘To gain access to areas of the ship that offer the best chance of finding what we came here for, there’s only one way anyone is getting inside the Tomioka,’ she said.

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Anders. ‘The umbra’s still in place, so an aerial assault isn’t an option.’

  ‘The crystalline buttressing is too thick at the base of the tower,’ added Tanna.

  ‘The only way in is on the back of Lupa Capitalina,’ said Linya. ‘It has the capacity to carry two assault forces, and its height means it’s just below the ceiling of the umbra, but tall enough to carry us to where the ice around the ship’s base is thinnest.’

  Anders grinned. ‘I’ve always wanted to ride into battle on the back of a god-machine.’

  ‘Should we expect to find more of those crystal beings inside?’ asked Tanna, already assimilating the addition of a Titan to his own deployment plans.

  ‘More than likely,’ said Kotov.

  ‘And do we have any idea what they are?’ asked Anders. ‘Magos Dahan, you got up close and personal with them. Any insights?’

  Dahan stood with one shoulder hunched as three tech-menials and armourers worked on his damaged body. Shrouded fusion-welders worked beneath the folds of his mantle of bronze mail.

  ‘I have never seen their like,’ he admitted. ‘They were crystalline, that much was obvious, empowered by an energy source centred in their chests. Passive data recordings suggest it to be a form of bio-morphic induction energy, similar to that encountered by explorator teams excavating tomb structures on the southern fringes of Segmentum Tempestus.’

  ‘Necrontyr?’ asked Azuramagelli. ‘Surely it is impossible that such beings could be found beyond the galaxy’s edge.’

  ‘Pay attention, I said similar, not identical,’ said Dahan. ‘You have all parsed the data. Draw your own conclusions.’

  ‘They are not necrontyr,’ said Kotov.

  ‘Then what are they?’ demanded Tanna. ‘A new xenos-breed?’

  Kotov shook his head. ‘Strictly s
peaking, no, they are not alive, though in manifesting cognitive awareness of their surroundings and behaviour that appears to be intelligently reactive, they could easily be mistaken for living organisms.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer his question,’ said Galatea, stretching one bio-mechanical hand into the image of the Tomioka. Kotov masked his irritation, but Galatea spoke again before he could continue. ‘You know as well as we do the nature of this foe.’

  ‘Archmagos?’ asked Anders, when Galatea didn’t continue.

  ‘I believe them to be a form of bio-imitative machinery seeded within the crystalline structure of the plateau,’ said Kotov. ‘Essentially, billions of micro-bacterial sized machines threaded through the crystalline matrix of the ground, each useless in and of itself, but capable of combining into something greater than the sum of its parts. They reacted to our presence, forming a mimicking force to repel us, like white blood cells rushing to the site of a biological infection.’

  ‘I have never heard of technology such as this,’ said Kryptaestrex, as though affronted by the idea. ‘Why has it not been recorded in the data-stacks of Mars?’

  ‘Because it was never brought to fruition,’ said Kotov. ‘Magos Telok pioneered this research after his expedition to Naogeddon in the turbulent years following the fall of the High Lord. He never presented his work to any Martian Frateris Conclave, because he could never get it to work.’

  Anders tapped the flat slate of the surveyor grid. ‘Looks like he has now.’

  ‘If Telok never presented his findings, how do you know this, archmagos?’ asked Tanna.

  ‘Do you think I would mount an expedition such as this without preparation, Sergeant Tanna?’ asked Kotov, rising to meet the implied challenge. ‘Believe me when I say that I have studied all aspects of Archmagos Telok; his every published monograph, his every experimental record and every lunatic tale woven around him since he was inducted into the Martian priesthood and his expedition’s disappearance. My preparations were no less thorough than yours would be for battle. The key to understanding Telok, my Templar friend, is not just in learning everything, but in recognising what amongst that is of value and what is wanton embellishment.’