Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Kotov couldn’t understand it, but one thing was clear.

  It was getting stronger.

  ‘I take it you hear that, archmagos,’ said a bobbing, gold-chased skull floating beside him, kept aloft by a tiny suspensor and embellished with a single flared wing that fluttered back and forth at its occipital bone. One eye socket was fitted with an ocular-picter, the other with a sophisticated augur implant that recorded and relayed its findings back to the Speranza.

  ‘Yes, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘I do, but it irks me that I cannot understand it.’

  ‘The ship’s cogitators are struggling too,’ said the skull with Blaylock’s voice. ‘I am applying all sanctioned enhancements and filters to the source code, but they are statistically unlikely to retrieve anything of use.’

  ‘Understood, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘But keep trying. I want to know what this ship is saying.’

  The skull clicked its jaws and drifted back to its position at Kotov’s shoulder as the downward journey through the Tomioka continued down welded ladders, crudely-formed ramps and repositioned stairwells.

  Kotov followed the Black Templars down a screw-stair welded to the side of a corridor, letting his fingers brush against a line of angular symbols that resembled ancient hieroglyphics or a forgotten branch of mathematics. He’d seen variations of these symbols ever since they’d boarded the Tomioka, each ideogram connected to another like the holy writ of a circuit board. Linya Tychon believed it to be an impossibly complex form of organic language belonging to a hitherto unknown xenos breed, a declaration that had only heightened the tension among the Mechanicus boarders.

  Where Kotov, Dahan’s skitarii and the Black Templars were forging a path down through the Tomioka’s internal structure, Vitali Tychon’s gifted daughter was ascending. Escorted by a company-strength detachment of Cadian storm troopers led by Captain Hawkins, she had eagerly seized this chance to venture into the unknown. Curiously, Galatea had chosen to accompany her, the abominable machine intelligence keen to explore Telok’s flagship now that the threat beyond its hull had been dealt with. Magos Azuramagelli had been seconded from the Tabularium’s command deck to oversee the mission to the ship’s bridge, assuming such a location still existed.

  Kotov reached the bottom of the screw-stair to find himself in a high-roofed transverse corridor that had been sealed at either end by heavy panelling fashioned from elongated panels torn from the ship’s prow blade. There appeared to be no way to continue downwards, though skitarii melta gunners were hunting for weak points in the floor and strangely scraped walls to attempt a breach. Kotov detected heavy deposits of lubricant grease and felt the presence of electrical current.

  Magos Dahan beckoned Kotov over to a jury-rigged control panel against the far wall, but before he could join him, Tanna intercepted him.

  ‘How much farther down do you believe we need to go, archmagos?’ asked Tanna.

  ‘I believe we are close, sergeant,’ replied Kotov.

  ‘With every level we descend, the danger increases.’

  ‘We are explorators, Sergeant Tanna,’ Kotov reminded him. ‘Danger comes with the territory.’

  ‘You are an explorator, I am a warrior.’

  ‘Then you should be used to danger, sergeant,’ snapped Kotov.

  The Space Marine’s anger was unmistakable, but Kotov paid it no attention and moved past him to join Dahan. A series of gem-lights winked on the panel, indicating that it had power. Its only other component was a simple lever that could be racked to an up or down position.

  ‘Elevator controls,’ said Dahan. ‘Funicular transit ones ripped from an embarkation deck by the size of them.’

  ‘This whole chamber is a descent elevator,’ said Kotov, now understanding the nature of the scrapes on the walls and the excessive presence of lubricants.

  ‘The enginarium spaces should be beneath,’ said Dahan. ‘The source of the power emanations?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Kotov taking hold of the descent lever. ‘If whatever is below us bears any resemblance to the original plan.’

  Kotov pulled the control lever into the down position. ‘So let us find out,’ he said.

  The chamber shuddered and ground downwards on bleating hydraulics and clanking gear chains.

  Entire structural elements had been removed from the upper reaches of the Tomioka’s hull and replaced with crystalline panels that refracted outside light through the enclosing ice in strange ways. Linya blink-clicked images of rainbow-hued prismatic beams dancing in the open spaces, the light catching glittering motes of dust and reflecting from the polarised visors of the Cadians’ enclosing helmets. The brightness gave the impression of space and peace, but that was, she reminded herself, an illusion.

  ‘Wondrous, is it not?’ asked the voice of her father. ‘Reminds me of the magnificent processional cathedrals of ice and glass within the Artynia Catena.’

  Vitali Tychon’s voice emerged from a jet-black servo-skull flitting through the air like a curious insect, the audio scratchy with distortion and warbling with singsong static. The presence of the umbra surrounding the Tomioka made standard orbital vox impossible, so all transmissions between the ground forces and the Speranza were relayed through the Tabularium to the landing fields before finally being hurled into space.

  ‘There’s a resemblance,’ agreed Linya, addressing the floating device, which had been built from removed segments of her father’s own skull after he had decided to enlarge his cranial cavity with an artificial replacement to allow for additional implants. ‘But we are not on Mars, we are exploring the hostile environment of an ancient madman.’

  ‘Madman? Visionary? Often the two are separated by a hair’s-breadth,’ observed Vitali, as twin callipers mounted under the jawbone produced a quick sketch of the view before his proxy skull.

  ‘I know which one I would use to describe Telok,’ said Linya.

  ‘Before I saw this, I might have agreed with you, but this is incredible,’ said Vitali as the servo-skull floated ahead to where Magos Azuramagelli was ascending a narrow stairwell by folding his ratcheting machine body into a more compact form. Contrary to what Linya had expected, Azuramagelli was negotiating the convoluted spaces within the Tomioka with relative ease, swiftly climbing ladders with multiple arms, and reordering his brain-fragments within the armature of his protective casings to facilitate his transit.

  Given the self-assembled crudity of Galatea’s form, it had no such ability to alter its body-plan and was forced to take looping detours to avoid the more cramped routes to the bridge. Linya had been glad of the respite from its presence, but each time they reconnected with the hybrid machine intelligence, she wondered just how it managed to get ahead of them. She and the Cadians were supposed to be following the most direct route to the bridge, but each time the dimensions of a blast door or cored shaft prevented it from proceeding Galatea would be waiting for them in a wider space beyond.

  What, she then thought, was it doing while it was beyond their sight?

  Linya shook off such suspicions and concentrated on her own progress, following four squads of void-suited Cadian troopers as they forged a path upwards, moving in fits and starts as different groups advanced higher into the ship in mutually supporting cover formations. Another three squads followed behind, and Linya admired the effectiveness with which Captain Hawkins was leading his men; from the front and with nothing asked of them he wasn’t prepared to do first.

  Cadian combat argot was terse and tactically precise – for a verbal form of communication – with clear commands and unambiguous meanings. Skitarii mind-links were a far more efficient means of combat communication, but required cranial implants she suspected most soldiers of the fortress-world wouldn’t accept.

  Despite Kotov’s gloomy predictions, their winding upwards passage through Telok’s ship was meeting with no resistance, either in the form of the crystal-form creatures or impassable architecture. While her father’s servo-skull flitted ahead as a gleeful s
cout, she and the Cadians climbed the Tomioka’s cavernous internal chambers via chugging freight elevators haphazardly fixed to the walls with docking clamps, scaled vertical transit shafts on multiple ladders welded to the deck and scrambled up ramps of canted ceiling plates.

  The crystalline panels sent their light deep into the heart of the ship, creating an airy, open feeling; which was a novel sensation for Linya, who normally found being aboard a starship tiresomely claustrophobic, even one as vast as the Speranza.

  She paused at a makeshift landing that looked out over a wide open space that had probably once been an embarkation deck. Light flooded the area through a series of opened docking hatches far across the chamber, through which gaseous mist billowed. The temperature gradient formed clouds in the upper reaches of the embarkation deck, and moisture fell through the interior in a soft shimmer of rain that patterned her hood with vapour trails.

  ‘Don’t think we should dawdle, Miss Tychon,’ said a Cadian trooper whose shoulder patch identified him as Lieutenant Taybard Rae. ‘Sooner we get you and your… friends to the bridge the sooner we can get out of here.’

  Something in the soldier’s manner was instantly disarming and Linya smiled within her environment hood. Like the Cadians, she was protected from the hostile conditions, but the technology keeping her alive was far more advanced; a self-generated, full-body integrity field and flexing cranial canopy with a multi-spectral sensorium.

  ‘You don’t like it in here?’ asked Linya, looking through the glittering nitrogen rain. ‘Sights like this do not come often. They need to be savoured.’

  ‘Begging your pardon, Miss Tychon, but Captain Hawkins said we weren’t here on a sightseeing trip. And trust me, you don’t want to get his dander up when we’re on a mission.’

  Linya recalled Captain Hawkins from the regimental dinner she and her father attended in the Cadian billets. Her impression had been that Hawkins was a man of few words, though he had been coaxed to loquaciousness when toasting the fallen soldiers of Baktar III.

  ‘He is a strict officer?’ she asked.

  Rae looked perplexed at the question. ‘Aren’t we all?’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so, though I confess I have only met a few.’

  ‘Ach, he’s not so bad,’ said Rae, slinging his rifle and leaning out over the balcony. ‘I’ve served under a lot of captains and colonels in my time, so when you get a good one, you try and keep him alive. You know what senior officers are like, miss, always trying to get themselves shot or blown up. They’re like children really, they need their lieutenants to keep them out of trouble.’

  Clearly deciding to take Linya’s advice, Rae turned and rested his folded arms on the iron balustrade, taking in the splendour of the vista before him. ‘Rain in a starship,’ he said, shaking his helmeted head. ‘Hell of a thing.’

  ‘Yes, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such an occurrence,’ said Linya.

  ‘Makes you think though, eh?’

  ‘About what?’ asked Linya, when Rae didn’t continue.

  ‘About why you’d bring a ship all this way from the Emperor’s light just to crash it on a world that’s going to die,’ said Rae, making room for one of the rearguard squads to pass, ten soldiers with rifles pulled in tight to their shoulders.

  ‘So why do you think Telok did this?’ asked Linya.

  ‘You’re asking me?’ laughed Rae. ‘I’m just a gruff, incredibly handsome and virile lieutenant, what do I know about tech stuff like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Linya, gesturing to the misty cavern of the rotated chamber. ‘You tell me.’

  Rae grinned and tapped the side of his helmet.

  ‘Well, whoever did this had himself a plan, right?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you don’t go to all the effort of standing a starship on its arse for no reason. So I’m guessing this Telok fella, he knew Katen Venia was going to be destroyed sooner rather than later, yeah?’

  ‘That would be a safe assumption, Lieutenant Rae.’

  ‘Then it stands to reason that whatever he’s got planned is going to happen soon,’ said Rae, unlimbering his rifle. ‘And whatever that is, I get the feeling that being inside this ship won’t be the best place to be when it starts.’

  To those without noospheric adaptations, the command deck of the Speranza was a cold steel elliptical chamber that looked nothing like the bridges of Naval ships of war. Silver-steel nubs jutted from the floor like unfinished structural columns, and a number of otherwise unremarkable command thrones were placed at apparently random locations.

  But to the servitors hardwired into those gleaming nubs and the Mechanicus personnel manning each station, it was a far more dynamic place than the sterile steel and preserved timber compartments of starched Navy captains and their underlings. Thousands of shimmering veils of data light hung suspended in the air like theatrical curtains about to rise and spiralling arcs of information-rich light streamed from inload ports to be split by data prisms, diverted throughout the bridge and processed.

  Magos Tarkis Blaylock sat in the command throne lately vacated by Archmagos Kotov. His black robes were etched with divine circuitry and his chasuble of zinc alloy was a fractally-complex network of geometric designs and machine language. Green optics pulsed beneath his hood and streams of coolant vapour rose from him as though he were smouldering. His retinue of stunted dwarf-servitors fussed around him, rearranging his floodstream cables and regulating the flow of life-sustaining chemicals to his bio-mechanical body, a complex mix of proteins, amino acids, blessed oils and nutrient-dense lubricants.

  As Fabricatus Locum, the Speranza was his to command in the absence of the archmagos – it was a task he relished. The sheer power of the Ark Mechanicus was unimaginable, a vast repository of knowledge and history that would take the Martian priesthood a thousand lifetimes to process.

  Blaylock prided himself in his ability to assimilate enormous volumes of data, but just skimming his consciousness over the golden light of Speranza’s core spiritual mechanisms was enough to convince him that to descend into its neuromatrix would be to invite disaster. Necessity had forced the archmagos to enter the deep strata of the Speranza’s machine-spirit during the eldar attack, and Blaylock still did not know how he had managed to extricate himself from its impossibly complex lattice after securing its help.

  Together with Vitali Tychon, who occupied an adjacent sub-command throne, Blaylock was engaged in fleet-wide operations that would normally require substantial Mechanicus personnel to handle. Vitali’s floodstream betrayed his child-like wonderment at the data exloading from the surface, but Blaylock found something strangely familiar in its nature, as though he was somehow already aware of its content.

  He dismissed the thought and turned his attention to a last strand of partitioned consciousness that was currently engaged in hunting the bondsmen who had instigated the interruption of servitude among the Speranza’s cyborg servitor crew. Each of the indentured workers collared on Joura had been implanted with fealty designators and should, in theory, be easily found.

  But neither the senior magi nor constant sweeps of cyber-mastiffs and armsmen could locate Bondsmen Locke, Coyne and Hawke. Nor could they find any trace of the rogue overseer, Totha Mu-32, and the servitor said to have recovered its memories. Nor was their any evidence of the rumoured arco-flagellant Bondsman Locke was said to possess.

  It was as if they had simply vanished.

  Which, on a Mechanicus ship, was surely impossible.

  Blaylock left that portion of his consciousness to keep searching, and returned to the business of running the Speranza. Between them, he and Vitali were maintaining the ship’s position over Katen Venia’s turbulent polar region, processing the surveyor readings exloaded from the surface, communicating along Manifold links with the senior commanders on the surface, optimising shipboard operations of over three million tertiary grade systems and coordinating the fleet manoeuvres in expectation of a cataclysmic stellar event.

  The li
kelihood of Arcturus Ultra exploding in the immediate future was statistically remote, but the pace and fury of the reactions taking place in its nuclear heart were beyond measure; nothing could be taken for granted. As far as possible, Blaylock – with Magos Saiixek in Engineering’s assistance – was keeping Katen Venia between the fleet and the dying star. If this star did go nova, a planet wasn’t going to offer much in the way of protection, but it was better than nothing.

  +So much information,+ said Vitali over their hardline link. +Wondrous, is it not? How often does one get to see the destruction of an entire planet this close?+

  +I have overseen Exterminatus protocols on three worlds, Magos Tychon,+ said Blaylock. +I know what extinction level events comprise.+

  +Ah, but this is a natural event, Tarkis. Completely different. Of course I have seen the after-effects of such events from the orbital galleries on Quatria, but to be here is something we won’t soon forget.+

  +We will not forget it at all,+ said Blaylock, irritated at Vitali’s interruptions. +The data has already been recorded and the Mechanicus–+

  +Never deletes anything,+ finished Vitali. +Yes, I am well aware of that tiresome truism, but to see an event like this first-hand is quite different, regardless of what you might be about to tell me about experiential bias.+

  +Is there a point to this current discourse?+ asked Blaylock. +The surveyor emissions from the surface are complex enough to process without having to divert additional processing capability to interpersonal discourse.+

  Vitali nodded. +Yes, the sheer volume and complexity of what I am seeing is quite…+

  The venerable magos broke off as a simulation he had running in the background finally reached its conclusion, coalescing in a bright sphere of glittering information. His multi-digit hands splayed it outwards, but Blaylock did not bother to inload whatever spurious experiment the stellar cartographer was running.