Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Vitali?’ asked Roboute, disconnecting from the Speranza’s network and rising from his seat at the foot of Kotov’s throne. ‘What’s going on? I don’t understand what’s happening.’

  ‘I think it is fair to say that we are all adrift here, captain,’ replied Vitali. ‘But what I believe we are seeing is a state of universal birth and death played out in the same moment. This could very well be an ultra-compressed rendition of every single moment of time since the creation of the universe to its eventual end, when its endless transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and hence into heat have finally run down like a clock and stopped forever.’

  Roboute didn’t understand more than a fraction of what Vitali had just said, but caught the apocalyptic gist of it easily enough. He looked up at Kotov, who had half-risen from his throne, his expression that of a man who had discovered his heart’s desire only to find it was a poison chalice.

  ‘Telok actually did it,’ said Kotov. ‘You were right, Tarkis. He actually got it to work.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ answered Blaylock. ‘And it appears we have blundered straight into his laboratory, mid-experiment.’

  Roboute turned back to Vitali, looking up at the one aspect of the ship’s datasphere still available now that he was no longer plugged in via his spinal implants.

  The hauntingly beautiful image of Katen Venia’s death.

  ‘This is the Breath of the Gods,’ said Roboute. ‘Imperator, we’re right in the middle of it all…’

  The reticulated net of light surrounding Katen Venia pulsed with one last exhalation.

  And exploded outwards in an onrushing tidal wave of photons and exotic particles that had not been seen in such concentrations for nearly fourteen billion years.

  Only afterwards would any coherent picture of events surrounding the destruction of Katen Venia emerge, and even that proved to be fragmentary, contradictory and almost unbelievable.

  Moments before the rapidly expanding energy shockwave exploded outwards from the doomed world, every square metre of ray shielding and every functional void pylon ignited across the Speranza. Every ship of the Kotov fleet found its shields flare into life and its external augurs shut down at the same moment, each captain at a loss as to the source of the initiating command.

  The surging explosion of high energy flux, huge particle densities and pressures slammed past the Kotov fleet, scattering its ships like a spiteful warp fluctuation. Saiixek’s work to re-orientate the Speranza did much to mitigate the damage of the blast wave; the sheer mass of the Ark Mechanicus allowed it to ride out the worst of the explosion’s force. The very proximity of the fleet to Katen Venia isolated it within the eye of an outward-rushing bow wave of exotic particles, compressed gravity waves and unknowable forces.

  Almost as soon as the blast wave passed over the fleet, a phase transition occurred, causing an exponential expansion of remodelled space-time. Passive auspex on the external surfaces of the Speranza registered an ultra-rapid spike in temperature caused by the high-energy photon density. Particle/antiparticle pairs of all descriptions were being instantaneously created and destroyed in violent collisions of sub-atomic matter – and only one other instant in history had achieved such a violent moment of creation.

  But this was no creation of a universe, this was that force harnessed by incomparably ancient technology and bent to another purpose altogether.

  Alone and isolated, the ships of the Kotov fleet battened down the hatches and rode out the storm of unleashed energies, fighting to hold their position in a ferocious upheaval of system-wide gravitational fluxions that could tear them apart in a heartbeat. Compared to the forces of matter transition being wielded in the Arcturus Ultra system, the titanic power of the Halo Scar paled in comparison. Tossed and swatted through space like leaves in a storm and not knowing if any of the other vessels were still alive, each captain fought to keep their ship intact until the fury of this stellar event was spent.

  It took a further seven hours before the raging swells of high-energy particles and hyper-charged gravitational wavefronts had dissipated enough for any of the fleet vessels to risk deploying surveyor arrays. Travelling at near light-speed, whatever had exploded from Katen Venia would certainly have reached the star at the heart of the system by now. Having weathered the storm better than most, the Speranza was first to tentatively probe the void in an attempt to learn what had just happened.

  Via a series of buffered servitor-proxies, Magos Azuramagelli eased the Ark Mechanicus’s senses out into space, sampling the local spatial volume for extreme thermoclines and harmful radiations. Given the existing chaotic nature of the dying system and the violence of the eruption from Katen Venia, he expected to find space lousy with squalling particle storms, volatile neutron flow and a background hash of electromagnetic noise that would render much of surrounding space virtually impenetrable to auspex.

  What he found was far stranger, far more unexpected, and utterly unbelievable.

  Arcturus Ultra was no longer a dying red giant, a bloated destroyer in its last incarnation before its explosive death as a supernova.

  Now it burned as a life-sustaining main sequence star.

  Glittering bands of metallic debris, rubble and coalescing gases surrounded the newly rejuvenated sun, the building blocks of planets. Gravity and time would do the rest of the work, and though millions of years might pass before worlds capable of sustaining life could form, such spans were the blink of an eye to a galaxy.

  Katen Venia had gone, destroyed in the very act of creation it had propagated.

  Only one impossible, yet inescapable conclusion presented itself.

  The shock wave of unimaginably vast energies had been the corollary to an immensely powerful stellar engineering event centred upon the Tomioka. The sensory-occluding fields of stellar debris and radiation ejected from the dying star that had hidden what lay beyond the system was gone as though it had never existed, and Azuramagelli’s surveyors registered the presence of numerous systems with glowing stars of just the right mass and heat for sustaining life.

  All arranged in a celestial alignment that was too perfect and too geometric to be accidental.

  At the centre of this lattice of stars, the location Vitali Tychon’s cartographae had identified as the source of the initiating burst of energy, was a world broadcasting powerful isotope readings, energy signatures and Manifold-traffic that were instantly recognisable to every adept on the Speranza.

  Adeptus Mechanicus.

  What had once been effortless for her, as easy as stepping from one room to the next, now took an effort of will and mantras of focus she had not needed since her first, halting steps on this path. Bielanna’s mind felt caged, hemmed in by the layers of armour plating and hard angles inimical to the curvature of space-time pressing in around her. Her spirit was unable to take flight with the ease it had once taken for granted. The skein was tantalisingly within her grasp, its secrets at her fingertips, if only she could rise from her body. Invisible fetters hung upon her spirit, chaining it to the prison of skin, blood and bone. Was this a sign of her abilities failing or simply a side-effect of the hurt she had suffered in the last moments of the battle against the foolish humans?

  She wanted to blame this terrible place of iron and oil they were forced to occupy after the Starblade had finally succumbed to the mortal wound the human’s chronometric weapon had inflicted. The Starblade’s shipmaster and his crew had remained aboard the graceful vessel as it was finally torn apart by the gravitational storms within the Halo Scar. They had died alone, their spirit stones lost and the light and beauty they had brought to the universe extinguished forever.

  Bielanna felt their loss keenly, but shut herself off from the all-consuming grief, knowing it would only hinder her ascent into the skein.

  A handful of the Starblade’s warriors had escaped with Bielanna through a hastily-crafted webway portal; they had all felt the nightmarish force of what the mon-keigh had unwittin
gly released on the outermost planet of the star system.

  But only Bielanna truly understood the utterly alien nature of it.

  That so cosmically powerful an event had not appeared in any version of the myriad entangled potential futures scared Bielanna more than she thought possible. An entire star system had been transformed, renewed and regenerated in a matter of hours. Such power was not meant for the galaxy’s current inheritors. Even the eldar in the days before the Fall, when their civilisation had spanned the galaxy and their arrogance had known no bounds, would not have dared meddle with such awesomely powerful forces.

  Such arrogance was entirely human.

  She had followed the threads of these humans in order to cut them and restore her future of motherhood, but the greater threat of this new power demanded precedence. Past, present and future were on a collision course, pulling together into a convoluted knot that would tear the fabric of space-time apart as the universe attempted to undo this violation of its natural order.

  Taking a series of calming breaths, Bielanna fell back on the gentle gifts of Farseer Tothaire, recalling his meditative exercises that unbound spirit from flesh and material attachments from spiritual awakening. She let out a soft sigh as her spirit slipped its moorings and lifted into the outermost edges of the skein, letting its familiar mosaic of pasts and futures wash over her and renew her with its liminal beauty. It had no geography, save that which she imposed upon it, though its fluid, structureless immensity was only fleetingly visible through the many barriers that separated her from its depths.

  Bielanna sought something familiar in the web of possibility that surrounded her, threads she could cling to and follow, pathways to lead her into the oceanic vastness of the skein. The golden threads of her assembled warriors surrounded her, but each time she tried to follow their paths into the future, they skittered away like a pack of startled Warp Spiders.

  Holding to her teachings, she reached back into the past, to where the threads of life were fixed and unchanging. From such static points she could reach into the future and gain a measure of understanding of what was to come. Yet even here she was unable to find solace or surety.

  Bielanna remembered the past, the fight of the Avatar of Kaela Mensha Khaine against the Space Marine leader aboard his doomed vessel. She recalled his cold eyes and yet… and yet, she found she could not picture his face, nor the words that passed between them with true clarity.

  Except that wasn’t right either.

  She remembered his blue eyes, his green eyes and his brown, amber-flecked eyes.

  She remembered his tapered jaw, his bearded face, his clean shaven, hairless chin.

  She remembered angular cheekbones, a rounded face. Scarred features and unblemished skin.

  Bielanna saw the dying man represented a thousand times, each incarnation entirely different, as though a procession of warriors could have taken his place in any number of potential pasts and unwritten futures. That was not possible, she remembered that dying man. She had looked upon him with her own eyes. Why could she not remember his face…?

  But no matter how she traced her own thread back into the past, that moment remained elusive and fragmentary, as though it had happened not once, but an infinite number of times. Even as she struggled to secure the memory, it splintered apart, shards of memory and fiction flashing past her in ever-expanding futures that had never come to pass.

  She saw the Space Marine destroy the flaming avatar as many times as she saw it cast his body to ruin. She saw herself torn apart by explosive shells from his brutish weapon, saw herself cut him down with elegant sweeps of her rune-etched sword. All of these unremembered histories were false and true, impossible and certain. In one fraying thread she had already lived them, by another they had never happened, but the truth of it became impossible to know.

  The past rejected her attempts to pin it in place, without the past the mysteries of the future became an unknown country. Bielanna cried out in frustration, the walls of light and potential around her closing in at her all-too-material emotions. Yet amid this horror of uncertainty, Bielanna sensed something of her own kind, an echo of another eldar’s touch among the mon-keigh. No more than the vaguest hint; a fragile connection that spoke of friendship not hatred, respect not fear.

  But like the fleeting impression of a glimmer-face within the Dome of Crystal Seers, the very act of noticing it hid the familiar trace from sight. Bielanna’s spirit howled in anger, but the skein was no place for such emotions, and she felt the irresistible tug of her body. She fought to remain in this place of enlightenment, but the more she struggled, the more pressure her bodily existence exerted on her fragile, fleeting soul.

  Her shoulders slumped as her body and soul were reunited with a bittersweet sorrow, the ache of freedom lost and a lightness of being forsaken. Her lungs heaved in a breath of sickly air redolent with the stench of alkaline water, chemical pollutants and oil-soaked manflesh. She did not want to look around her, for the sight of so ugly a refuge offended her refined sensibilities and was a heartbreaking reminder of all they had lost.

  Bielanna opened her eyes and a leaden weight settled upon her shoulders at the sight of so few eldar. Fifteen warriors, a mix of Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees, sat or stood or went through the motions of training in sullen groups of resentful survivors. No words of recrimination had been directed at her, but Bielanna needed no spirit-sight to see their mistrust and anger at her failure to protect their fellows.

  Somewhere on the edges of their hidden lair aboard the enemy flagship, Uldanaish Ghostwalker patrolled the darkness with a handful of Howling Banshees. The towering wraithlord was eager to kill mon-keigh despite Bielanna’s command to remain out of sight. Their presence had gone undetected so far, but the humans weren’t so stupid as to not notice entire work gangs of their machine-priests and slave workers going missing time and time again.

  ‘Farseer,’ said a lyrical, almost musical voice with a lethal edge that snapped her from her melancholy reverie. ‘You have guidance for us?’

  Bielanna felt her body’s assimilation of her spirit intensify at the sound of Tariquel’s voice, his singular purpose like an unbreakable chain around her. She exhaled a calming breath and tried not to let her nascent claustrophobia at being returned to her body in this tomb-like vessel overwhelm her.

  ‘The future is… uncertain,’ she said, lifting her head and looking into his cruel eyes.

  Tariquel was clad in form-fitting armour of jade, its plates contoured to match the peerless physique beneath. Shoulder guards of pale ivory and gold gave his shoulders a bulk they did not normally possess, and his segmented helmet was retracted into the ridged cowl at his neck where two bulbous stinger-blasters nestled like the venom sacks of a meso-scorpion.

  ‘Uncertain?’ spat Tariquel of the Twilight Blade. ‘How is that possible? You are a farseer!’

  Bielanna flinched at the psychic force of his anger and pointed to the vaulted chamber wall behind him, where a ten-metre-wide cog was stamped in bronze and beaten iron. A half-robotic, half-human skull sat at the centre of the icon, caustic steam leaking from one eye socket and a shimmer of toxic run-off dribbling from the raised portions of its carving.

  ‘Uncertain,’ she repeated, gathering up her runestones and collecting them in the bowl fashioned for her by Khareili the Shaper. ‘And it grows ever more so.’

  ‘Then what use are you to us?’ demanded another voice, this one stripped of its musical qualities and pared back to the cold barb at its heart.

  Bielanna rose from her crouch and forced her beating heart to remain calm in the face of the exarch’s cold fury. Ariganna Icefang was clad in armour that stretched back into the ancient days of the eldar race, and Bielanna could feel the hungry souls that still dwelled within its unknown heart. Its plates had originally been crafted for a male warrior, but over the numerous incarnations of bearers it had been reshaped many times, though no bonesinger had ever dared whisper to its murderous
purpose. Gold and emerald plates overlapped with a sinuous organic quality, the pommel of the curved chainsabre strapped over her shoulder glittering like a hungry amber eye.

  ‘Uncertain does not mean unseen,’ said Bielanna, fighting to keep her composure. Aboard the Starblade she had been the leader of these warriors, but with their starship’s destruction and her link to the skein’s mysteries, that dynamic had turned on its head.

  Now the warriors were in the ascendency.

  ‘Then what have you seen?’ demanded Ariganna, the monstrous Scorpion’s Claw on her left fist flexing like a segmented tail. ‘The shadows hide us so that we may hunt, not skulk like thieves.’

  ‘There are hints and shadows of the future, but the skein has been greatly upset,’ said Bielanna, trying to articulate a realm of the mind in terms a warrior in love with Death would understand. ‘Whatever it is the humans have done here has been like casting a boulder into a still lake. Waves and ripples are spreading great discord, but they will settle and our path into the future will be revealed once more.’

  Ariganna’s face was hidden behind her war-mask and the furnace-red slits of her helm lenses were smouldering pits of anger. Where the rest of their survivor band had kept their heads bare to hold their war-masks in check, the Striking Scorpion exarch kept hers to the fore, letting her furious anger simmer and grow ever more deadly. The mandiblasters at her jaw spat crackling arcs of killing energy as the exarch loomed over Bielanna.

  ‘You are farseer and deserving of respect,’ said Ariganna, reaching out to place her claw hand on Bielanna’s shoulder. ‘But your visions have only led us to death and sorrow. Tell me why I should trust you again.’

  Ariganna could crush her without effort and the bones of Bielanna’s shoulders flexed under the fractional pressure of the exarch’s clawed grip.

  ‘Because there is one among the humans aboard this vessel whom we might reach,’ she said, as the truth of what she had glimpsed in the skein became clear to her at last. ‘One of their number has been marked by another farseer. I can find him and turn him to our cause.’