Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Blaylock was stunned, and Kotov saw him struggling to comprehend the enormous web of causality that needed to combine to produce a confluence of factors so unlikely as to be virtually statistically impossible. Kotov saw the dense web of probability calculus interleaving throughout Blaylock’s noospheric aura and smiled as he saw the calculations fall apart as the numbers involved grew too large to manipulate by conventional algebra.

  ‘The Omnissiah has brought us here?’ asked Blaylock, dropping to his knees before the vast icon of the Cog Mechanicus. ‘I have always had faith in the Machine Spirit, but to see its workings laid out before me like this is… is…’

  ‘It is wondrous, my friend,’ said Kotov, placing a hand on Blaylock’s hooded head as divine radiance shone through the Processional Way and filled it with light.

  Even filtered through the crackling picters of Amarok’s surveyor suite, the cascading bands of ochre and umber in Hypatia’s sky reminded Linya of the years she had spent as a youth in the volcanic uplands of the Elysium Planitia. Then, she had been a gifted initiate of Magos Gasselt, bound to his Martian observatoria cadres as Oculist Secundus; now she was Cartographae Stellae of her own trans-orbital gallery. With numerous technological achievements to her name, Linya’s rank authorised her to petition the Fabricator General himself, requisition planetary tithes and assemble Imperial forces to serve the goals of the Mechanicus.

  Yet she had done none of these things, because she was, at heart, an explorator.

  At first she had explored space through the multiple lenses and orbital relays of Mars – and then Quatria – but the gradual realisation that just observing the far corners of the galaxy wasn’t enough had come to her as she and her father had studied the growing inaccuracies arising in their maps of space around the Halo Scar. Linya had grown tired of looking at distant stars and systems; she wanted to feel their light upon her skin, to taste unknown air and tread the soil of those worlds she had only known as smudges of light on electrostatically-charged, photosensitive plates.

  She smiled as she realised her reasons for joining the Kotov fleet were much the same as Roboute Surcouf’s and wondered what he would make of walking the surface of an alien world as part of a god-machine’s crew.

  The interior of the Warhound was humid and stank of heated oils and blessed lubricants. The compartment in which feral tech-priests, too long in the service of a Titan Legion, had implanted her was coffin-sized and designed for beings whose comfort was of no concern to the Titan’s princeps.

  Gunnar Vintras had spoken to Linya and her father only to remind them that he would tolerate nothing less than the same level of competence as the servitors they were replacing, a needlessly patronising remark that only a discreet noospheric nudge from her father had kept her from addressing. The princeps of Warhounds were notoriously arrogant and reckless, and Vintras appeared to revel in that preconception with a relish that bordered on the ridiculous.

  He had assigned Linya to operate the port-side stabilisation array, a task that involved compensating for any ill-judged steps the princeps might make and running the real-time gyroscopic calculations that allowed a fifteen-metre-tall bipedal war machine to remain upright at any given moment.

  To a hexamathical-savantus secundus grade, such calculations were child’s play, which allowed Linya to savour this new experience to the full.

  There was something pleasing in the simplistic nature of the controls available, and Linya had to remind herself that she was operating a position normally occupied by a servitor. She had coaxed a shimmering holographic display that clearly hadn’t been used in decades to life and the planet’s surface swam into view in ripples of photons.

  The Adeptus Mechanicus had descended to the surface of Hypatia like a rapacious swarm of tyranid feeder organisms and promised to be no less thorough in stripping the planet of its resources. Titanic mining machines deployed in numbers that made the expedition to Katen Venia resemble a dilettantes’ excursion.

  Each harvest force landed where orbital surveys had revealed the most promising deposits of the required materials, and almost as soon as each cadre of machines rumbled from their landers they began smashing the planet’s surface apart. Underground caverns filled with chemically-rich oceans were drained, while earth-churning digger leviathans descended on previously bombarded sites to tear open the planet’s crust to a depth of hundred and thirty kilometres, exposing the ductile, mineral-rich seams of the superheated asthenosphere.

  Magos Kryptaestrex oversaw the resource gathering as Azuramagelli coordinated the mammoth task of shipping the excavated raw materials back to the phosphor-bright comet of the Speranza hanging in low orbit.

  With the harvesters excavating, drilling, siphoning and refining a continent’s worth of the planet’s surface into materials usable by the Speranza’s forges, Princeps Vintras walked them far beyond the scattered dig-sites and into regions that had not registered enough interest in the geological surveys.

  The swaying motion of the Warhound took a little getting used to, but once Linya had acclimatised to its loping gait, she found it easier to concentrate on experiencing the world around her. Her father, ensconced in the opposite stabilisation array, sent a constant stream of excited chatter directly to her cranial implants, bypassing the engine’s Manifold and pointing out curious geographical features of Hypatia’s birth pangs.

  Though still millions of years old, Vitali estimated that Hypatia was in the mid-stages of its planetary development, with its landmasses still largely confined to one vast supercontinent that was only slowly being broken up by the gradual movement of tectonic plates. Its oceans were viscous bodies of toxic black liquid and its mountains were nightmarish spines of volcanic eruptions and sudden, violent earthquakes.

  ‘Princeps Vintras appears to relish the prospect of running his engine close to regions that ought to be best avoided,’ said Linya, working to compensate for the brittle nature of the ground beneath the Titan’s clawed feet as the Warhound stomped down a sheer-sided canyon of orange rock.

  ‘Warhound drivers,’ said Vitali, as though that was all that needed to be said.

  ‘What do you make of this canyon?’ asked Linya. ‘It appears to be almost perfectly straight. Unnaturally so.’

  ‘You suspect an artificial hand in its formation?’ teased Vitali. ‘Like the canals of Mars?’

  Linya smiled at her father’s mention of the ancient belief that Mars had once been inhabited by an extinct race of beings who had carved vast channels close to the planet’s equator. As laughable as the notion of the Cebrenian face, which had in fact been made real by an early Martian sect of killers in homage to another half-remembered myth.

  ‘No, of course not. Unless Telok paused here,’ she said, adjusting the gyroscopic servos as the Warhound dropped down a sharp split in the rock and turned in towards the mouth of an almost perfectly V-shaped valley. ‘We know nothing certain about the power of the Breath of the Gods. If it can regenerate a star, then a little bit of terraforming should present no problem.’

  ‘You could be right, daughter, and while this region does evince a level of artificiality, it seems somewhat perfunctory for an artefact capable of stellar engineering, don’t you think?’

  ‘Admittedly,’ said Linya, shearing a thread of consciousness to mesh with the passive auspex of the striding war machine. The data-feeds were of a more martial nature than she was used to, each return a measure of threat and war-utility; cover ratios, potential ambush locations, dead ground, blind spot and free-fire zones.

  She filtered out the majority of such inputs, leaving the auspex panel mostly blank, for what did a Warhound princeps care for the composition of the rock, the atmospheric make-up or the wavelengths of the various spectra of light? Linya brought the environmental data to the fore, gathering information on the Warhound’s immediate surroundings with every sweep of the auspex.

  Yet the most telling detail wasn’t one she gathered through the numerous auspex feeds on the Tit
an’s hull, it was through the swaying pict image from the external picters. The walls of the valley swept past the Titan, striated bands of sedimentary rock laid down over millions of years and, looking at the evidence before her, it suggested that this valley had not been ripped into existence by tectonic movement at all.

  ‘Father, are you seeing this?’ she said.

  ‘I am, though I am not sure quite how I am seeing it,’ said Vitali. ‘This is a river valley…’

  ‘How is that possible? The oceans are still forming, but the appearance of the rock suggests this valley was carved through the mountains by the action of a vast river.‘

  ‘This is most peculiar,’ said Vitali, as the Warhound strafed around a spur of stone that looked almost like the broken stub of a great wall. ‘Quite out of keeping with a world of this age and whose oceans are only just forming. But planetary accretion is, given the enormous spans of time involved, still something of a mystery, so I expect it won’t be the last incongruous thing we see on Hypatia.’

  The pict screen before Linya crackled to life as the threat auspex lit up and every input she had filtered out bloomed on the slate before her.

  ‘I think you might be right,’ said Linya, staring at the ruined city spread over the valley floor.

  +Kryptaestrex, are you seeing this?+ asked Azuramagelli, switching the cabling from the inload sockets of his cerebral jars and dispersing the input through the command deck’s data prisms.

  +Whatever it is, it can wait,+ said Kryptaestrex from a data hub linking him to the cargo holds and embarkation decks. +Have you not seen the level of my data-burden?+

  +No,+ replied Azuramagelli with a crackle of belligerent code. +It cannot wait.+

  +I am co-ordinating a planetary harvesting mission,+ snapped Kryptaestrex. +A thousand cargo shuttles are ferrying back and forth from the planet’s surface and there are hundreds of ship-wide lading operations in progress. I have little inclination to deal with whatever your problem is.+

  Azuramagelli shunted the data with greater force.

  +Look,+ he demanded, seeing the flare of irritation surge through Kryptaestrex’s floodstream.

  Irritation that faded just as quickly as Kryptaestrex saw what Azura-magelli had seen.

  +What is going on down there?+

  The data was image-capture from one of the dormitory decks below the waterline, an area of the ship where gravitational torsion forces within the Halo Scar had buckled the Speranza’s ventral armour almost to the point of a breach. Only hastily-mounted integrity fields were maintaing atmospheric pressure, but the power drain of such a solution was proving to be untenable, and Archmagos Kotov had tasked a thousand-strong labour force of bondsmen and servitors with repairing this damage to the lower decks.

  Crackling sheets of energy arced through the chamber, leaping from stanchion to stanchion and filling the vast space with a storm of lightning. Men, women and children were soundlessly screaming as the lightning blitzed through the lower-deck living spaces, turning living bodies to ash and smoke with every flickering blast of blue-white light.

  +Impossible,+ blurted Kryptaestrex. +There are no electrical power sources within the chamber capable of generating such a discharge.+

  +That isn’t electricity,+ said Azuramagelli, taking urgent inloads from the Speranza’s astropathic choir chambers. +Choirmasters across the ship are reporting a psychic event of battle-grade levels.+

  +Warp-craft?+

  +Unknown, but Choirmaster Primus believes the source to be non-human. Recommendation: cut power to the entire deck,+ said Azuramagelli. +Flush out whatever is causing this.+

  +The integrity fields are tied into the chamber’s grid!+ protested Kryptaestrex. +We would lose the deck and repair materials. There are thousands of workers down there.+

  +You would rather lose the entire ship?+

  The door to the command deck hissed open and Archmagos Kotov strode in with Magos Blaylock at his heels. The archmagos was clearly aware of what they were seeing, and his order was swiftly and mercilessly given, in the full and certain knowledge of what it meant for the thousands of people below the waterline.

  +Cut the power,+ he said.

  Impossible was the word Linya kept groping towards as Amarok strode cautiously through the ruined city. Princeps Vintras had initially been reluctant to enter, but the natural aggression and hunter instinct of the Warhound had won through and convinced him to explore the shattered structures and rubble-strewn streets.

  That a city of such age should be found on a world in the mid-stages of its life cycle was highly unlikely, for the surface had yet to achieve a level of geological solidity that would make raising cities of such size a viable proposition. Numerous buildings appeared to have been wrecked by earthquakes and Amarok was forced to detour several times to negotiate wide chasms ripped through the city streets. Twice the Titan had braced itself against single-storey structures as earth tremors shook the ground. Neither had force enough to concern her or the Warhound’s princeps, but they were indicative of the planet’s underlying instability.

  Linya had been forced to revise her initial impression of Gunnar Vintras. Cocksure and arrogant certainly, but he was also a highly-skilled Warhound driver, darting from cover to cover and keeping his engine’s back to the walls as he moved deeper into the city.

  ‘It’s Imperial,’ said her father. ‘That much is obvious. There’s STC patterning clearly visible on almost every structure.’

  ‘I see that,’ said Linya as a slab-sided hab-block passed to her right. ‘But the auspex readings are making no sense. I can’t get a certain fix on the age of this city from one structure to the next.’

  ‘No,’ agreed her father. ‘I’m seeing emissions that suggest much of this city was constructed around fifteen thousand years ago.’

  ‘That’s pre-Great Crusade,’ said Linya. ‘Might this place have been settled in the First Diaspora?’

  Her father paused before answering and Linya looked up from the pict-slate, which displayed a grainy image of a collapsed structure that had borne the brunt of an earlier earthquake. Its exposed floors were awash with debris, but she saw no sign of any previous habitation.

  ‘That is certainly one conclusion,’ said Vitali.

  ‘I can’t think of another.’

  ‘Premature ageing,’ said Vitali. ‘Accelerated decay caused by entropic fields. I’ve heard of xeno-breeds possessing technology capable of such feats, but never on this scale.’

  ‘That’s something of a reach, is it not?’ asked Linya. ‘Lex Parsimoniae suggests that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most often the correct one.’

  ‘You’re right of course, my dear, and under normal circumstances I’d agree with you.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I have linked with the Speranza’s more specialised surveyors, and take a look at what they are detecting. Compare the current readings to what we detected when we first began building the map of this region from Galatea’s inloads.’

  Linya switched her inload array to display what her father was seeing, and once again, impossible was the word that first leapt to mind.

  ‘They’re different,’ said Linya. ‘By a small, but significant amount. I don’t… but that’s…’

  ‘Impossible?’ finished her father. ‘Routine chronometric readings are now telling me that the planet we are on is younger than it was when the Speranza set course towards it. This is not a planet evolving through its mid-stage of development, but one that has reverted to it over a vastly compressed time-frame. And one that will continue to revert until it breaks apart into an expanding mass of stellar material.’

  Linya struggled to process the idea that a planet could regress through its phases of existence. If she accepted it as truth then the laws of space-time were being violated in unspeakable ways, and she felt her grasp of what constituted reality being prised loose from every-thing she had learned as a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  ‘Do you think this
is a side-effect of the Breath of the Gods?’ she asked.

  ‘One can only hope so,’ said Vitali. ‘The alternative is too terrible to contemplate, that the fundamental laws of the universe are not nearly as fixed and constant as we have assumed.’

  ‘We need to alert the harvesters,’ said Linya. ‘Before Hypatia reverts to a more unstable phase.’

  ‘Please, do you think I wouldn’t have already done that?’ asked Vitali.

  Before Linya could answer, she registered the incoming seismic waves through the gyroscopes set within the lower reaches of the Warhound’s clawed feet. The magnitude of the incoming energy was far greater than anything she had seen before and they were right over its epicentre.

  ‘My princeps!’ she shouted, but it was already too late, as the full force of the earthquake roared up from the planet’s depths. The buildings around them were smashed apart in a storm of splintering masonry and snapping steelwork. Cladding panels and roof spars cascaded from the tallest towers as the most damaged buildings simply ceased to exist.

  Millions of tonnes of rubble fell in roaring avalanches of broken rock as the valley shook itself apart. Dust billowed from chasms that tore through the city like splitting ice on the surface of a lake, and apparently solid rock ripped open as easily as tearing parchment. Amarok staggered like a mortally wounded beast as the ground lurched and broke apart into bifurcating chasms. Spewing gouts of magma bubbled to the surface, bathing the ruined city in a hellish, red glow.

  Linya’s stabiliser panels blared warnings as their tolerances were horribly exceeded, filling the Titan’s interior with emergency lights. Even insulated within the lower reaches of the god-machine’s body, the noise was deafening. Linya fought to keep the Titan stable as Vintras threw Amarok into a looping turn. The rock beneath the war-engine cracked and split into geysering crevasses.

  Linya grabbed onto a handrail above her head as Amarok leaned far beyond its centre of gravity.

  She cried out as she realised the Titan was going to fall.