Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Vintras wore his full Titanicus dress uniform: white and silver, with the twin canidae pins picked out in gold on the lapels of his crimson-edged frock coat. Without furs, Vintras would be chilled to the bone, but to his credit he let none of that discomfort show on his hollow-cheeked face.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ said Vintras, looking over at Koskinen.

  Koskinen didn’t reply – it was forbidden to speak to an omega without the alpha’s permission – and looked over at Joakim Baldur. His fellow moderati nodded, and they each took hold of Vintras by the upper arms and all but dragged him towards the rostrum. The two men marched between the paired ranks of Legio personnel; who turned away from the disgraced princeps as they passed, directing their attention towards the Wintersun.

  The cold at the rostrum seemed sharper and more dangerous, like a sudden freeze was imminent.

  He and Baldur presented Vintras to the Wintersun, who drifted to the front of his tank with his unseeing eyes fastened upon his disgraced pack-warrior. His elongated and bulbous skull nodded once and Elias Härkin took a clattering, mechanised step forwards.

  ‘Gunnar Vintras, warrior of Lokabrenna and scion of the black and silver mountain, you come before us as princeps of Legio Sirius.’

  The nasal distortion of Härkin’s pathogen-ravaged vocal chords was unpleasant to hear, but what he had to say next was even more so.

  ‘As princeps were you entrusted with the life and honour of the war-engine, Amarok?’

  ‘I was,’ answered Vintras.

  ‘And have you failed in that duty?’

  ‘I have,’ said Vintras. ‘My engine was mortally wounded and its machine-spirit extinguished. No-one but I bears the shame of that.’

  Härkin looked back to the Wintersun, who floated back into the occluding viscosity of his casket. This was a duty for the Moonsorrow to perform, to fully cement his position as pack Tyrannos.

  +A machine-spirit is never extinguished,+ said the Moonsorrow. +It returns to the Omnissiah’s light. Bodies of flesh and blood can never outlive a body of steel and stone, a soul of iron and fire.+

  ‘I accept whatever punishment you see fit to impose, Moonsorrow,’ said Vintras.

  +You do not get to call me Moonsorrow. Only pack uses that name and you are no longer pack. You are omega.+

  Vintras nodded. ‘So be it,’ he said, lifting his head and baring his neck.

  +Begin, Härkin,+ said the Moonsorrow. +Spill his blood.+

  Härkin nodded and removed a long-bladed knife with a bone handle from a kidskin sheath attached to his leg calliper. Knowing what was required, Koskinen and Baldur once again held Vintras by his arms. Härkin took his knife and made two quick slashes, one across each of Vintras’s cheeks. As droplets of blood ran down his face, Härkin placed the knife against the princeps’s throat, drawing the blade over the skin; hard enough to draw blood, but not so deep as to end his life.

  A princeps, even a disgraced one, was too valuable an individual to be so casually thrown away.

  The required mental and physical demands of commanding a titanic war-engine were so enormous as to exclude virtually the entire human race. Only truly exceptional individuals could even train to become a Titan princeps, let alone become one. But censure had to be given and be seen to be given. Vintras would forever bear the ritual scar of failure upon his throat.

  Härkin cleaned his blade on the fabric of Vintras’s uniform and sheathed it before reaching up to remove his canidae rank pins. He stepped back to his assigned position at the foot of the rostrum and nodded to Koskinen and Baldur.

  Piece by piece, they stripped the Titanicus uniform from Vintras, letting each item of clothing fall at his feet like discarded rags until he stood naked before the Legio. His body was muscular and heavily tattooed, marked by honour scars and ritual branding marks indicating engine kills and campaign records. The skin beneath the inking was marble-pale and not even Vintras’s stoic demeanour could prevent the cold from finally impacting on him. He shivered in the freezing temperature, naked and vulnerable and brought low before his Legio.

  +Now you truly are the Skinwalker,+ said the Moonsorrow.

  Vitali had been advised against siring an heir. The likelihood of emotional attachment would be high, his fellow magi told him. The risk to his researches would be incalculable in the time it would take to raise an offspring, for surely he would wish to observe the development of his clone first-hand. He had ignored them all, desiring a willing apprentice to continue his work after he had gone. The arrangement was to be purely functional, for Vitali was a man obsessed with the workings of the universe and his concerns were cosmological, not biological.

  But all that had changed when a one in ten trillion random fluctuation in the genetic sequencing of his clone had spontaneously mutated its code and transformed what should have been a genetic copy of Vitali into a distinct individual. A daughter.

  Linya had surpassed his every expectation in ability and Vitali had grown to love her as much as any celestial phenomenon, even going as far as to name her after what many believed was the true name of the daughter –o r sister, no one knew for certain – of the composer of Honovere. Invasive augmentation of developing brain cells during her hothoused gestation period in the iron womb had given her an enhanced intellect and growth speeds from birth.

  Within her first year of life Linya was already acting as his assistant, her enhanced mind housed within the equivalent bodyshape of a six-year-old child. Her physical growth had assumed a more traditional pattern soon after, but her mind had never stopped developing, and soon she was outstripping magi with decades more experience in mapping the heavens.

  Traditional education had proved too stultifying for her quickened intellect, and she had fled one Mechanicus scholam after another, always finding her way back to the orbital galleries to study with her father. And so he had trained her in the mysteries of the universe, and she took her place at his side as his apprentice as he had always hoped, though with a bond of mutual respect and love as opposed to the functional arrangement he had anticipated.

  Many pitied him or shook their heads at his foolishness, lamenting what he might have discovered or otherwise turned his intellect towards were it not for the distracting influence of flesh-kin to keep him from his duty to the Omnissiah.

  They were wrong, knew Vitali.

  Any loss to the sum of knowledge held by the Mechanicus had been Vitali’s gain.

  Linya was going to surpass them all, she was going to rewrite human understanding of the stars and their aeons-long existence. The name of Linya Tychon would be mentioned in the same breath as those great pioneers who had championed the first transhumanism experiments; Fyodorov, Moravec, Haldayn and the vitrified enigma of FM-2030.

  All this Vitali had known with a surety in his bones that he now understood was simple vanity.

  Linya was his creation, and she was going to outlast him and exceed him in every way.

  How very biological of him.

  Sitting by his daughter’s side as she lay unmoving within a sterile containment field, Vitali now saw how foolish he had been. The treatment Linya had received was second to none, the very best the Speranza had to offer. Senior medicae and Medicus Biologis had spent the last thirteen days bending their every effort into restoring her body, managing her pain with precisely modulated synaptic diversions and reclothing her surviving limbs with synth-grown skin.

  They had done all that could be done. Winning the fight for life was now up to her.

  Linya’s future hung in the balance, and no one could predict on which side the coin of her life might turn.

  Vitali’s brain had been augmented, rewired and surgically conditioned in so many ways that its processes resembled those of a baseline human in only the most superficial ways. He thought faster and on multiple levels at once. His powers of lateral thinking and complex, multi-dimensional visualisation were beyond the abilities of even gifted human polymaths to comprehend.

 
Yet he was as crushed by guilt and grief as any father at the sight of his child in pain.

  He knew he could have spared himself this pain had he not been too proud, too stubborn and too bloody-minded to listen to his peers and forego the siring of a successor. If he had been proper Mechanicus he could have neatly sidestepped this horror and simply chosen an apprentice from the most promising of his many acolytes.

  But then he would have denied himself the joy of Linya’s existence, the pleasure of her growth and learning, the wonder of her personality shining through, no matter how steeped in the ways of the Martian priesthood she became. Though Cult Mechanicus to her bones, Linya had a very rare, very bright spark of humanity that refused to be extinguished no matter what replacement cybernetics were implanted within her biological volume.

  Archmagos Kotov and every one of the senior magi had come to pay their respects to his daughter, each expressing a measure of regret that was surprising in some, downright miraculous in others. Magos Blaylock had visited Linya’s bedside on numerous occasions, each time displaying an empathy Vitali had hitherto not believed him capable of exhibiting.

  Roboute Surcouf had been a regular visitor, and his grief was a depthless well of regret that reminded Vitali of the time he had spent with the eldar. Clearly something of that xenos species’ capacity for extremes of emotion had been passed to the rogue trader during his time spent aboard their city-ship.

  Vitali had no capacity with which to shed tears, having long ago sacrificed even that tiny space within his skull for extra ocular-cybernetic hardware. Instead, he extended a sterile mechadendrite into the counterseptic field surrounding Linya and rested its callipers on her shoulder, hoping that some measure of his presence would somehow be translated to her sedated body.

  The augmented mind was a complex organ, and despite their lofty claims and interventions, not even the highest ranked genetors of the magi biologis truly understood the subtleties of its inner workings. Mechanicus records were replete with apocryphal accounts of the grievously wounded and those in supposedly vegetative comas being brought back from the brink of death by the words of a loved one. And right at this moment, Vitali was willing to clutch at any straw, no matter how slender or unsubstantiated.

  He read from one of Linya’s archaic books; a rare collection of poems from Old Earth, monographs on celestial mechanics and the biographies of many of the earliest astronomers ever to make the stars shine brighter by bringing them within reach of their earthbound brethren. The first stanzas he transmitted via the noosphere and binaric code blurts, but when he came to Linya’s favourite passage, he switched to his flesh-voice.

  ‘I am an instrument in the shape of a woman,

  trying to translate pulsations

  into images for the relief of the body

  and the reconstruction of the mind.’

  The poem was said to date from an epoch before the Age of Strife, though that seemed unlikely given the devastation wrought in that cataclysmic era; but it had not been its clear antiquity that Linya liked, rather the fact that it acknowledged the role of a woman in the earliest age of galactic exploration.

  Vitali had no real appreciation for poetry, but he knew beauty when he saw it.

  Space was a vast wonderland, a tapestry of universal magnificence that any with eyes to see could witness. It was the desire to breathe that wonder into others that had driven him to galactic telescopes, and that same wonder lay at the heart of Linya’s creation.

  He would not sacrifice the pain he was feeling now and forego the joy of having known his daughter and watched her grow.

  ‘Do you believe she can hear you?’

  Vitali turned, expecting to see another Mechanicus visitor, but his lip curled in contempt as he saw Galatea squatting at the arched entrance to the medicae chamber. Its squat body was lowered almost to floor level and is silver eyes were trained on Linya.

  Vitali felt his loathing for this… thing reach new heights.

  Why should this abomination get to exist while his daughter’s life hung in the balance?

  He forced back the venom in his throat and turned back to the bed.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Vitali. ‘I hope so. Perhaps if she hears that I am with her it will give her the strength to fight for her life.’

  ‘A very biological conceit,’ said Galatea. ‘We know of no empirical evidence to support the capacity for perception while in a medicated state.’

  ‘I do not care what you know or do not know,’ snapped Vitali. ‘I am reading to my daughter, and nothing you can say will convince me I am wrong to do so.’

  Galatea entered the medicae chamber, its mismatched limbs clattering on the tiled floor. The ozone stink of its body and the flickering light of its brain jars reflected from the brushed steel of the machinery keeping Linya alive.

  ‘We do not wish to do so,’ said Galatea, extending a manipulator arm and resting it on Vitali’s shoulder. ‘We come to offer you our sympathy, such as it can exist for a biological entity. We had grown fond of Mistress Tychon in the time we had known her.’

  ‘My daughter is not dead,’ said Vitali, fighting to hide his surprise at the machine’s unexpected sentiment. ‘She may yet recover. Linya is a fighter, and she will not let this finish her… I know it.’

  Vitali’s voice trailed off and Galatea moved to the other side of Linya’s bed.

  ‘We sincerely hope so,’ it said. ‘She is too precious to be taken away by such ill-fortune.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had interacted that much with Linya.’

  ‘Indeed, yes,’ said Galatea. ‘When we took over the exload from the Tomioka’s cogitators, we linked with her mind and saw just how exceptional a being she is.’

  ‘Exceptional,’ said Vitali with a hopeful smile. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what she is.’

  Abrehem sat on a metal-legged stool before Rasselas X-42 and folded his arms. The arco-flagellant reclined on its throne-gurney with the articulated arm and leg restraints splayed, rendering it like some ancient anatomical diagram. The wounds it had suffered at the hands of the Space Marines were extensive, enough to have slain a bondsman many times over. Only its superlative artificiality and accelerated metabolic augmentation had kept it alive, though those selfsame biological mechanisms had kept it in a state of regenerative dormancy since then.

  The aftermath of the abortive revolution on the embarkation deck had given Abrehem a great deal to consider, particularly his continued usage of the arco-flagellant. In the confused days after the Speranza had pulled out of her death dive over Hypatia, his time had been spent in secretive and noospherically-conducted negotiations with Archmagos Kotov, hammering out a means by which the fleet could continue its mission of exploration and treat its workers with respect.

  It had been a protracted and often thorny maze to negotiate, but a peace of sorts had been achieved. The servitors and bondsmen went back to work and Abrehem had sent Hawke and Coyne with them. He too had been offered amnesty, but knowing how easily his capture might allow the archmagos to renege on his promises, Abrehem, Ismael and Totha Mu-32 had remained in hiding.

  The overseer had patched Rasselas X-42’s horrific injuries as best he could, but even with inloaded medicae databases to call upon, the sheer incomprehensibility and density of the biological hardware within X-42’s body rendered every attempt to restore function akin to little more than educated guesswork.

  The bolter wound in the arco-flagellant’s side had healed itself, forming a gauze of synthetic skin that over time had bonded with his hardened skin shell to leave a glossy carapace of scar tissue. Totha Mu-32 had removed over eighty-seven individual shards of bolt casing from the arco-flagellant’s back before packing that wound with synth-flesh and applying a counterseptic dressing.

  As grievous as the bolter wounds were, it was the Black Templar’s sword blow that was of greater concern. Numerous chem-shunts situated in the hollows between X-42’s shoulder and collarbone had ruptured, spreading a distilled cockt
ail of potent drugs designed to initiate combat reflexes, states of dormancy, healing and self-immolation. Mixed together, the effect had been to plunge X-42 into a delirious state of feverish nightmares that only the immediate engagement of high-level devotion protocols in its pacifier helm could quell.

  But even that was of lesser concern than the damage the powered blade had caused as it ripped up the side of X-42’s skull. The metallic cowl encasing the left side of its head had been cut away cleanly, exposing panels of circuitry that were beyond any living magi’s ability to restore. What their function might have been was a mystery, but that they were, on some level, still operative – albeit in an aberrant way – was obvious from the twitches and convulsions wracking X-42’s body.

  Abrehem thought back to Ven Anders’s words as they’d spoken in the moments before things turned bloody. He knew he had been manipulated by a man who could convince other men to walk into hails of gunfire and then thank him for the opportunity, but that didn’t alter the fundamental truth of what he had said regarding Rasselas X-42.

  Abrehem was as good as keeping a slave, just as Archmagos Kotov was keeping the bondsmen and servitors in bondage. How could he demand basic human rights for the enslaved workers throughout the Speranza if he wasn’t willing to live up to the same standard?

  That question had driven him to take this course of action, a course of action that Totha Mu-32 had roundly condemned as an act of illogical foolishness. Ismael had disagreed and both stood behind him ready to step in at a moment’s notice should something go hideously wrong.

  Ismael appeared at his side and took his organic hand.

  Abrehem hardly recognised his former shift overseer any more. The vain, arrogant, self-entitled shit who’d made his life hell on Joura had vanished utterly and been replaced by a figure of such serenity and peace that it was like looking into the face of one of the Emperor’s saints painted onto a templum fresco.