Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Throughout the Speranza, tech-priests and lexmechanics rushed to every abandoned station in a desperate attempt to restore control, but as numerous as they were, the sheer number of duties undertaken by cybernetics far outweighed any hope of control by the Martian priests.

  ‘What in the name of the Omnissiah has he done?’ demanded Kotov.

  Magos Blaylock was wired into a dozen systems, via every method of connection available to him. His entourage of stunted vat-creatures stood curiously inert, as though they had decided to no longer assist their master.

  ‘Statement: unknown,’ said Blaylock. ‘Without exception, every servitor aboard the ship has ceased in its appointed task. They have either shut down their active systems connections or disconnected themselves… voluntarily…’

  The last word was breathed as a whisper, as if by its very utterance, the evidence before their senses might be refuted. Kotov looked over at Blaylock, who, for the first time since he had been appointed Fabricatus Locum, looked utterly helpless.

  ‘How has he done this?’ asked Kotov, stepping down to the deck and dragging noospheric sheets of light to him. He saw the truth of Blaylock’s words. Throughout the Speranza, the previously compliant servitor crew had ceased their functioning, standing as immobile as the flesh-statues in the cavernous cyberneticising-temples on Mars before the implantation of their encoded routines.

  Kryptaestrex was a flaring beacon of angry noospheric code as his carefully structured resupply plans were hopelessly disrupted and the loading docks ceased operating. Across from the Master of Logistics, Azuramagelli struggled to reroute every avionics package previously controlled by a cadre of navigational servitors to his station. The sheer volume of computational data delegated to cybernetics was staggering, and Kotov winced at the data-burden crackling between Azuramagelli’s brain fragments.

  ‘We need to re-establish control,’ said Kotov, extending a mechadendrite and hooking himself into the control web that oversaw the smooth running of the ship’s servitors. ‘Immediately. Send a restorative activation code to every servitor aboard the ship.’

  No sooner were the words spoken than his mechadendrite surged with feedback. Kotov snatched the sinuous limb from the connection port, trailing a froth of belligerent code and golden sparks.

  ‘The servitor networks are shutting themselves off from us,’ said Blaylock. ‘Locking themselves behind walls of binaric white noise. Even if we could establish a connection, they wouldn’t hear us.’

  ‘We need to get them back,’ snapped Kotov. ‘I will not be shut out of my own ship by a damned bondsman. A bondsman you have singularly failed to dig out from his wretched hiding place. This is your fault, Tarkis, you should have found and executed this man long before now.’

  ‘Rebuttal: this bondsman all but vanished from the Speranza,’ said Blaylock. ‘No amount of armsmen or bio-signature survey sweeps revealed any trace of his presence. It is my belief he has had help from Mechanicus personnel in evading capture.’

  Kotov forced a measure of calm into his floodstream, knowing that such recriminations were pointless. Accusations could be made once control had been re-established.

  ‘How close are our armed forces to the feeding hall?’ he asked. ‘I want Abrehem Locke dead.’

  ‘Cadians and armsmen are within four minutes,’ answered Kryptaestrex. ‘But we need this bondsman alive. What if he is the only one able to restore the servitors to their proper place?’

  ‘It’s not him,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘It’s the damned servitor that had its memory restored.’

  ‘Impossible,’ snapped Kryptaestrex. ‘That was just a rumour, a ridiculous farrago spread by the lower menials. I’ve heard its like a hundred times or more.’

  ‘Then explain this,’ said Azuramagelli.

  Kotov shut them both up with a harsh blurt of binary.

  ‘A servitor that had its memory restored?’ he asked.

  ‘So the lower-deck rumour mill has it,’ answered Azuramagelli.

  ‘Tell me everything you have heard,’ ordered Kotov. ‘Before I lose complete control of my ship.’

  The enginarium templum of the Speranza was a place of miracles, where the power of the Omnissiah was at its most controlled and most violent. Forget the explosive death of munitions, forget the murderous power of the Life Eater. In the plasma containment chambers was where the raw, primal essence of the Machine-God and the genius of the Mechanicus were most sublimely combined.

  Or so Magos Saiixek had thought until three minutes and fourteen seconds ago.

  Now he realised he was standing at the heart of what was likely to be a colossal explosion of superheated plasma energy that would reduce the vast structure of the Speranza to vapour. Chiming alarm bells pealed from on high, drowning out the binary hymnals of appeasement as geysers of emergency venting spewed columns of superheated steam into the air. Moist banks of humid, chemically-rich vapour gathered about the reactors like jungle-fog, refracting the scintillating illumination of the emergency lights in golden rainbows.

  Each cylindrical reactor was five hundred metres in diameter and two kilometres in length – almost eighty-five per cent of their mass comprised layers of ceramite heat shielding and containment field generators. One reactor alone was capable of supplying the energy demands of a mid-sized hive for centuries, and Saiixek was looking at twelve such reactors stretching off towards a vanishing point at the far end of the chamber.

  Entire cadres of servitors had been devoted to regulating the unimaginable core temperatures with mantras of prayer or ministering to the many hundreds of machine-spirits inhabiting the mechanisms empowering the reactors. The never-ending catechisms of maintenance and the continual ritualised workings were attended to by five hundred servitors for each reactor and, until three minutes and twenty-five seconds ago, they had been attending to their duties in perfect order.

  Now those same servitors simply stood and watched the reactors to which they had been bound relentlessly and inevitably spiral to destruction. Every override code, every mastery file and every Servitudae Obligatus had been rejected, like a high-functioning data-engine ignoring the advances of a lowly technomat. Power was no longer being fed to the engines, and the Speranza’s orbital track, already far lower than was prudent, was decaying at a rate that would soon see the ship caught within the planet’s gravity envelope beyond hope of escape.

  Assuming Saiixek didn’t lose control of the reactors before then.

  Standing atop the latticed mezzanine, overlooking the array of runaway fusion reactors, Magos Saiixek now understood how perilously tenuous his grasp on their control had been. He had stood at this very station and issued orders to these monolithic machines and thought himself their master.

  But what he had mistaken for mastery was little more than an illusion.

  Every single mechadendrite Saiixek possessed, from thickly-segmented cables like gleaming snakes to fibre-fine sensory wands, was engaged with the control stations to either side. Cold mist surrounded him, the cooling mechanisms of his upthrust backpack coating everything nearby in a veneer of hoarfrost. His black robes cracked in the frozen temperatures, though his metallic skull steamed with excess heat bleed from his monstrously overclocked cognitive processes.

  Like a conductor before an impossibly vast and complex orchestra, Saiixek had subsumed the capacity of every magos within range to process the insanely complex hexamathics of uncontrolled fusion in an attempt to keep the reactions from achieving critical mass.

  It was an impossible task, and the best he had managed was simply to keep the reactors from exploding. The geometric progression of the calculations’ complexity would soon outstrip his borrowed capacity to process, making his efforts a holding action at best, one that would see him burn out large sections of irreplaceable brain matter.

  But if his delaying tactic bought time for the archmagos to re-establish control of the Speranza’s servitors, it would be a price worth paying.

  Saiixek gasped as he f
elt a sudden thrust of cold within his physical volume.

  Such was the level of disconnect from his organic form, it took him several seconds to comprehend that his body had been injured. Saiixek looked down to see a length of white steel jutting from his body, a gracefully curved sword blade of non-Imperial design.

  ‘How curious,’ he said, as the blade was withdrawn and stabbed home three more times.

  This time there was no ignoring the pain and Saiixek fell to his knees. Blood and oil spilled from the precision-cut wounds in his body, flooding from his internal structures at a rate that he had not the capacity to know was mortal with any sense other than his eyes.

  He looked up as a woman circled around from behind him, clad in form-fitting armour of emerald plates. She wore a bone coloured helmet with a long red plume and bulbous extrusions at the gorget like some form of stinger. Her cloak of gold and green billowed in the vortices of hot and cold air, and her ivory sword dripped oil-dark droplets of his blood to the mezzanine floor.

  ‘Eldar?’ asked Saiixek. ‘Ridiculous. You cannot be here.’

  ‘You destroyed our vessel,’ said the eldar warrior-woman. ‘Now we destroy yours.’

  ‘Illogical,’ said Saiixek. ‘You will die too.’

  ‘To prevent your master from acquiring such power, we would die a thousand deaths.’

  ‘Outrageous hyperbole,’ said Saiixek, slumping against a control panel as the life flooded out of him.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t get any closer?’ cried Vitali, his desperation clear even over the internal vox from the cargo deck.

  ‘I can’t say it any clearer,’ replied Roboute. ‘We’re hooked on an e-mag tether and the Speranza’s not reeling us in. I can’t raise anyone on the embarkation deck either.’

  ‘Please, we have to get back aboard! Linya will die if we don’t get her to a medicae.’

  ‘I know that, damn you,’ snapped Roboute, instantly regretting his outburst. ‘But unless you can override this tether, we’re not going anywhere. The shuttle’s trying to link with the embarkation deck’s data-engines, but so far no luck. We’re not part of Azuramagelli and Kryptaestrex’s shipping timetable, and there’s no one answering who can override it.’

  ‘The Speranza is in lockdown…’ said Vitali. ‘Something terrible must have happened, an accident or unexpected event.’

  ‘So we’re stuck here?’

  ‘Until they bring us in, yes,’ said Vitali, and Roboute heard a father’s terror at the loss of his child.

  It was a terror he shared.

  The Renard’s shuttle was stuck in a holding pattern below the ventral fantail of the Speranza, kept a fixed distance from the Ark Mechanicus by the same e-mag tether that would normally pull them through the gravimetric turbulence surrounding the enormous vessel. Their lift-off had been unscheduled and would no doubt earn them a stern warning from Magos Azuramagelli, but this was an emergency and Roboute was willing to risk any censure to get Linya to a medicae quicker.

  Tears rolled down Roboute’s face at the thought of Linya Tychon’s death.

  He understood there was no prospect of a union between them; he’d accepted that. Instead, he’d been looking forward to a growing friendship, but even that looked unlikely.

  The distress signal from Amarok had been a howling bray of agony, a shriek of unimaginable pain that was instantly recognisable as belonging to a god-machine. Following that brash cry for help came a plea from Vitali Tychon, begging Roboute to fly to their rescue. The signal had been abruptly cut off, and seeing that Legio Sirius recovery craft would not reach the planet’s surface for over an hour, Roboute had immediately lifted off.

  The Renard’s shuttle landed amid the devastation of a ruined city, but Roboute’s myriad questions concerning the unexpected metropolis died in his throat as he saw the horrific injuries suffered by Linya.

  Only Vitali Tychon had emerged from Amarok’s wreckage without significant injuries. With the exception of Princeps Vintras, the crew of the Warhound were dead and the war machine crippled, listing over a sealed crevasse with one leg sunk fully into the cracked ground. Though he still lived, Vintras had not emerged unscathed; Manifold feedback left him weeping and paralysed, his nervous system wracked with sympathetic agony at the mortal wounding of his engine.

  But his injuries were nothing compared to what Linya Tychon had suffered.

  Roboute barely recognised the young, vivacious girl he’d met at Colonel Anders’s dinner, her flesh burned black and raw, with only her upper body having escaped the worst of the hellish inferno. Her father was keeping her alive, barely, with noospheric connections to her neuromatrix blocking the pain centres of her brain, but he was no medicae, and he could do nothing to treat the physical injuries that would undoubtedly kill her. They’d got her on board the shuttle as gently as they could and followed the most direct course for the Speranza. The shuttle’s servitors were administering first aid as best they could with their limited knowledge of human physiology, but without specialised medicae treatment, Linya would soon be dead.

  And now this…

  Roboute had tried every trick in the book to break the Speranza’s tether, every risky evasion technique and downright dangerous manoeuvre he’d learned in the skies of Ultramar, but nothing had come close to even weakening its grip. They were trapped out here, hooked like a fish on a line, unable to close or break away from the Ark Mechanicus.

  A warning light flickered to life on Roboute’s avionics panel, and he checked the readout to make sure he was reading it correctly, but hoping he wasn’t.

  ‘Hell…’ he said, standing and looking out through the shuttle’s armourglass canopy. ‘Oh, this is so very not good…’

  No doubt about it. The shimmering blue-hot plasma glow within the Speranza’s containment fields was fading, which meant the engines were no longer supplying thrust.

  Which meant its orbit was decaying.

  The Ark Mechanicus was going down.

  The gathering took place in the forward observatorium above the dorsal transit arrays, a central location that allowed the senior military forces the best options for deployment throughout the ship. From here the mag-lev transit trains were within easy reach, and the main internal teleporter array was in the process of being powered up by a chanting choir of tech-priests – with the accompanying ritual catechisms being voiced by carefully coached deck menials instead of servitors.

  Starlight filtering through the upper reaches of Hypatia’s atmosphere fell in glittering beams of umber and magenta, illuminating the terrazzo floor panels and reflecting across the multitude of stargazing optical machines that hung from the polished glass dome or stood on vast girder structures.

  The commanders of the Speranza’s fighting forces gathered to hear Archmagos Kotov’s briefing, each rapidly digesting hastily prepared dossiers on the mutiny’s ringleaders. Magos Dahan and Sergeant Tanna waited for Kotov to begin, while Colonel Anders continued to peruse his briefing documents.

  ‘What we have here is a full-scale mutiny,’ said Kotov to the assembled warriors, wishing to incite in them the same righteous anger at events taking place below decks. ‘A bondsman named Abrehem Locke has defied the legal and holy writ of the Mechanicus and incited rebellion throughout the Speranza. I want him and his cadre of supporters hunted down and killed.’

  ‘How many targets are you talking about?’ asked Tanna.

  Magos Blaylock answered the Space Marine’s question: ‘Six that we know of. Bondsman Locke himself and three others who were collared along with him on Joura, Vannen Coyne, Julius Hawke and Ismael de Roeven.’

  ‘De Roeven? Is he the servitor with the returned memories?’ asked Anders.

  ‘So below the waterline rumour would have it,’ said Blaylock, ‘Though such a thing has never been documented before, so must be viewed with suspicion. In addition, Bondsman Locke is accompanied by a rogue Mechanicus overseer, Totha Mu-32, and an imprinted arco-flagellant, Rasselas X-42. Both should be considered
extremely dangerous.’

  ‘An arco-flagellant?’ asked Anders with a sudden intake of breath. ‘I thought they were purely Inquisition weapons.’

  ‘They are,’ said Dahan, flexing the articulated joints of his multiple arms. ‘But who do you think makes them for the inquisitors?’

  ‘Where did it come from?’ askied Anders.

  ‘Does it matter?’ replied Tanna. ‘We do not need to know where it came from to kill it.’

  ‘No, but if I’m going to put my men in harm’s way, I want to know everything I can about this arco-flagellant. I saw one of them in action on Agripinaa. The thing went through a martyr-company of Bar-el penal troops who’d gone over to the enemy. It wasn’t pretty. And if this bondsman has one, then I’m going to damn well know everything there is to know about it.’

  ‘We do not have time for this, Colonel Anders,’ said Kotov. ‘If the servitors do not return to their stations within the next two hours and eleven minutes, the Speranza’s orbit will have decayed to a level that will mean a catastrophic re-entry is inevitable.’

  ‘Then answer my question quickly.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Kotov. ‘When I discovered the Speranza, it was unfinished, a buried skeleton of a starship that was virtually complete, but not entirely so. Many of its deeper structures and chambers were left unexplored or were inaccessible. It is likely this arco-flagellant was implanted with weaponry and pacification routines, but left as a tabula rasa for the designated inquisitor to imprint upon it.’

  ‘So it’s been sitting there like a bloody time bomb, just waiting for someone to stumble over it and set it loose?’

  Kotov did not care for the Cadian colonel’s tone, but recognised he had little time in which to take umbrage. ‘Essentially, yes.’

  Anders nodded. ‘That was careless of you. It’s like me forgetting where I parked my Baneblade squadrons and being surprised when someone drives them over me.’

  ‘What information do you have on Bondsman Locke’s current whereabouts?’ asked Tanna, cutting off Kotov’s bilious response. ‘Give me his location and my men will use these internal teleporters to attack with a swift and merciless response.’