Dalia was about to answer when an alarming thought suddenly occurred to her and she took a step back from the golden throne. 'You're not planning on strapping me into that thing are you?'
'No, Dalia, set your mind at ease on that,' said Zeth. 'You are far too valuable to me to expend your gift in so thoughtless a manner.'
The words were no doubt intended to be reassuring, but Dalia felt a chill that had nothing to do with the proximity of the psykers travel the length of her spine. It was a stark reminder that she was not a free agent; she was the property of the Mechanicum and her fate lay in the hands of Adept Koriel Zeth.
For all her apparent humanity, Zeth was a race apart from Dalia.
Two individuals born to the same race, but divided by a gulf of belief and ambition.
For all that, Dalia still wanted to be part of Zeth's designs. She looked around at her colleagues and saw that same desire.
'When do we begin?' she asked.
'Now,' said Zeth.
Tech-priests and enginseers filled the cavern set into the sheer walls of the Arsia Chasmata with the sounds and flickering lights of their efforts. Sparks flew from angle grinders and welders, hoists lifted great panels of armour, and the droning chants of the Sanctifiers Mettalus echoed from the walls of the repair facility.
Reclining in the repair bay, the war-scarred form of Equitos Bellum lay dormant as the artificers of the Knights of Taranis restored it to its former glory. Fortis Metallum and Pax Mortis had already been repaired and resanctified, the damage they had suffered in the reactor's fireball nowhere near as severe as that done to Maven's mount.
Raf Maven watched the labours from a gantry above, his thin lips pressed tightly together as he watched the work below. He watched a team of enginseers directing a servitor-manned hoist as it swung a fresh armaglass canopy over the wounded machine.
Maven winced, lifting his hand to his eye as he remembered the sympathetic pain of impact when his canopy had cracked.
His mount had been wounded badly by the enemy machine, and Maven with it. When Old Stator had found him unconscious in the wreckage of the destroyed reactor, Maven had been blind, his senses withdrawn in perceived pain. Psychostigmatic bruises and lesions covered his torso, which had nothing to do with the wounds he had suffered when Equitos Bellum had fallen in the wake of the explosion.
Only the transient protection of the building he had taken shelter behind had saved him from the blast, and healers of both flesh and steel proclaimed it a miracle that he and his mount lived at all.
Protectors and bulk transporters despatched from Ulysses Patera had brought them back to their order's chapter house in the Arsia Chasmata, the plunging canyon on the north-eastern flank of Arsia Mons.
Here, the work to restore man and machine had begun.
Maven's superficial wounds had responded quickly to treatment, his broken ribs set and his burns repaired with synth-skin. The stigmatic wounds took longer, seeming to heal in time with the repairs effected on Equitos Bellum.
His mount was without its colours, naked in its steel, its bodywork exposed to those who worked to restore its machine-spirit. Only the firedrake carving on the skull-cockpit had survived the molten heat of the explosion intact.
Watching the men and machines working on his mount, Maven wanted to tell them to get out, to leave the ministrations and repairs to him, but that was just his hurt pride talking. The artificers of the Knights of Taranis knew their craft and no better healers of metal could be found outside the priests that attended the Titan orders.
'Still here?' said a voice from the end of the gantry.
'Aye, still here, Leo,' he said without turning.
Leopold Cronus joined him at the gantry, his comrade-in-arms leaning on the railing and looking down at the noisy work going on below.
'How soon before it walks again?' asked Cronus.
'Not soon enough,' snarled Maven. 'Can you believe they were going to scrap Equitos Bellum?'
Cronus shook his head. 'A mount with so fine a pedigree? Madness. Thank the Machine for the Old Man, eh?'
When Maven had begun to suspect that the master of the forge was going to condemn Equitos Bellum, he had petitioned Lords Caturix and Verticorda to intervene to save his mount. By the time the battle assayers had finished their inspection, there had been no word, and the giant breaker-servitors were standing by.
Maven had placed himself between them and Equitos Bellum with his sidearm drawn. He remembered the lethal purpose filling him as he prepared to defend his wounded mount.
With the breakers moving in and Maven ready to kill, word had come down to the repair hangars from the Lightning Hall.
Equitos Bellum was to walk again.
Maven had stood vigil over his stricken machine ever since, as though fearing the order to restore Equitos Bellum to a war footing could be rescinded at any moment.
Cronus put a reassuring hand on Maven's shoulder.
'Your mount will be battle ready before you know it.'
'I know, but I wonder if it'll ever be as it was before.'
'How so?'
'Ever since the battle at Maximal's reactor I've felt… I'm not sure, a sense of things unfinished, as if neither of us will be whole again until we avenge ourselves.'
'Avenge yourselves on what?' asked Cronus. 'Whatever attacked the reactor was destroyed in the explosion. It's a damned miracle you survived.'
Maven pointed to the damaged Knight. 'I know it's a miracle - as surely as I know that whatever did this is still out there. Equitos Bellum can feel it out there and so can I.'
Cronus shook his head. 'That's just lingering somatic pain-memory. It's gone, Raf.'
'I don't believe that and nothing you say to me will convince me otherwise,' said Maven. 'It was void protected, Leo. It could easily have survived the explosion and escaped into the pallidus wastelands or the deep canyons of the Ulysses Fossae.'
'I read the after-action report,' said Cronus. 'But void-shielded? Only Titans have voids. Maybe it just had reserve power fields.'
'Yeah, or maybe I just missed,' snapped Maven. 'Or maybe heat bloom from the reactor made it look like it was shielded. Damn it, Leo, I know what I saw. It was shielded and it's still out there, I know it.'
'What makes you so sure it's still out there?'
Maven hesitated before answering. He looked up into Leopold's stolid face and knew that of all the people he could talk to about his lingering suspicions without fear of ridicule, it was Cronus. 'I couldn't feel anything from the machine,' he said. 'It was cold, like a dead thing.'
'A dead thing? What do you mean?'
'It was as if… as if there was nothing inside it,' whispered Maven. 'I didn't get any sense of a pilot: no battle fury, no flair and certainly no triumph when it hit me.'
'So you think it was a robot?'
Maven shook his head. 'No, it wasn't a robot. It reacted in ways that battle wetware can't, at least none I'm aware of .'
Both men knew that mono-tasked fighting robots were no match for skilled pilots, who could easily outfight machines with limited parameters of action.
'So what do you think it was?' asked Cronus.
Maven shrugged. 'It wasn't a robot,' he sighed. 'But then its fire patterns were so… textbook, like a rookie pilot on his first mission. I think that's the only reason I was able to get away without it taking me down. It was as if it had all the skills to destroy me, it just didn't know how to use them properly.'
'Then what are you going to do about it?'
'I'm going to hunt it down and kill it,' said Maven.
In the darkest vaulted chambers beneath Olympus Mons, three figures made their way down a cloistered passageway and through dust that had not been disturbed for two centuries. Tunnels and passages branched off into darkness, hewn into the bedrock of Mars thousands of years ago, but the three figures followed an unerring path through the maze as though pulled by an invisible cord or guided by an inaudible signal.
As he ma
de his way through the shadowed tunnels, Kelbor-Hal surprised himself by detecting elevated adrenal levels and increased production of interleukins that in an unaugmented human would indicate excitement.
The automaton followed behind him, oblivious to the momentous role its master was about to play in the future history of Mars. The Fabricator General turned his hooded head to face Regulus, the adept moving with a loping mechanical grace as they delved into the depths of the planet and towards their destiny:
The Vaults of Moravec.
Secrets that could not even be imagined awaited within that forgotten repository - a wealth of knowledge that had lain untapped and unexamined for a millennium. Such a waste of resource. Such a crime to disavow the legacy of the past.
A gaggle of floating servo-skulls accompanied them, swaying lumen globes held in pincer callipers hanging from their jaws.
Dust billowed in their wake and the metallic ring of their footsteps echoed from the dry, flaking walls as they travelled ever onwards. Regulus turned another corner, taking them through an echoing chamber with numerous tunnels branching off into the unknown.
Without pause, Regulus chose the seventh tunnel along the western wall and led them onwards, past dusty tombs, empty cells and bone-stacked alcoves of unknown worthies who had died and been placed in empty reliquaries in ages past.
They passed open chambers piled high with dust-covered books, forgotten volumes of lore and chained bookcases of ledgers, records and the personal logs of long-dead adepts. Kelbor-Hal saw open caverns with giant machines, seized solid with rust or so corroded as to be unrecognisable.
This was the legacy of leaving technology untapped, the only possible outcome of the Emperor's decree that the Vault of Moravec remain unopened. With each sight, he grew more and more convinced that this path was the right one, that this gift of Horus Lupercal was one that should be accepted.
Kelbor-Hal's positioning matrix informed him that he was precisely nine hundred and thirty-five metres beneath the surface of Mars. He traced their route on a glowing map projected before him and recorded every step of the journey on a memory coil buried deep in his lumbar region.
It galled the Fabricator General that he needed Regulus to guide him through the maze, for he had travelled this way once before and should have been able to retrieve the route from his internal records.
It had been two hundred years ago when Kelbor-Hal had last seen the vault of Moravec. Together with his golden-armoured Custodians, the Emperor had led the way into the dusty sepulchres beneath Olympus Mons. The Emperor followed the path through the maze of tunnels towards the lost vault, though how the ruler of Terra had known its location had never been satisfactorily explained.
Nor had the need that had driven him to find the vaults been expressed.
Kelbor-Hal had put aside such concerns, eagerly anticipating studying the unknown technologies that lay within the hidden catacombs beneath Olympus Mons.
When the vault was located, however, the Emperor simply stood before it without opening it. He had placed his hand on the sealed entrance to the vault with his eyes closed, and stood as immobile as a statue for sixteen point one five minutes before turning and leading his warriors back to the surface, despite Kelbor-Hal's protests.
It had been forbidden to store any record of the path to Moravec's vault, though Kelbor-Hal had, of course, secretly activated his cartographic memory buffers. However, upon returning to the surface, he had found them to be empty of any record of the journey. As though it had never happened.
Nor could any remote telemetry or surveyor equipment sent into the tunnels locate the vaults. It was as though the vault had been removed from Mars, deliberately hidden from the very adepts charged with its safety.
The effrontery of the Emperor in tampering with a senior adept's augmetics was staggering, and Kelbor-Hal had angrily demanded the restoration of the data.
'The Mechanicum never deletes anything,' Kelbor-Hal said.
The Emperor had shaken his head. 'The vaults of Moravec must never be opened. You will swear this oath to me, Kelbor-Hal, or the union between Mars and Terra will be no more.'
Unwilling to even enter into any negotiation on the subject, the Emperor had demanded Kelbor-Hal's oath, and he had had no choice but to agree. That had been the end of the matter, and two days later the Emperor left Mars to begin his conquest of the galaxy.
All of which made this transgression all the more delicious.
It was a small thing to break the oath, for what manner of man would seek to prevent the organisation charged with the maintenance of technology from learning secrets of the past that might unlock future glories? To deny a thing its purpose for existence went against all laws of nature and machine, and, by such rationale, logic dictated that the Vaults of Moravec must be opened.
'We are here,' said Regulus, and Kelbor-Hal spooled out of his memories and into the present.
They had emerged into a circular chamber of softly glowing light, a hundred and thirty metres in diameter, though Kelbor-Hal could see no obvious source for the illumination. Aside from one segment, the walls of the chamber were machine-smoothed stone, polished and gleaming like marble.
The segment of wall that was not stone was exactly as Kelbor-Hal remembered it, burnished metal that seemed to glow with its own inner luminescence. A curtain of energy, invisible to the naked eye, but a shimmering ripple of iridescent light to one with multi-spectral augmented vision, danced and swayed before this wall.
In the centre of the wall was a leaf-shaped archway, and set within it was a simple door fitted with a digital keypad and locking wheel. So simple a door, yet it promised so much upon its opening.
Regulus moved to stand before the energy field and turned to face Kelbor-Hal.
'This will bind the Mechanicum to the cause of Horus Lupercal,' said Regulus. 'You understand that if this door opens, there can be no going back.'
'I have not come this far to turn back, Regulus,' stated Kelbor-Hal.
'Moravec was branded a witch,' said Regulus. 'Did you know that?'
'A witch? No, I did not, but what difference does it make? After all, any sufficiently advanced technology is likely to be mistaken for magic by the ignorant.'
'True,' allowed Regulus, 'but Moravec was so much more than just a man ahead of his time in technological advancement. He was the Primus of the sect known as the Brotherhood of Singularitarianism.'
'I know this,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'The Coming of the Omnissiah was his last prophecy before he vanished.'
'The Brotherhood of Singularitarianism believed that a technological singularity, the technological creation of a greater-than-human intelligence, was possible and they bent their every effort to bringing it into being.'
'But they failed,' pointed out Kelbor-Hal. 'The warlord Khazar united the Pan-Pacific tribes and stormed Moravec's citadel before the rise of Narthan Dume. Moravec fled to Mars and vanished soon after.'
Regulus shook his head and Kelbor-Hal could read an amused ripple in his bio-electrical field. 'Moravec did not fail. He succeeded, and that made him dangerous.'
'Dangerous to whom?'
'To the Emperor,' said Regulus.
'Why? Surely the Emperor could have made use of his discoveries.'
'To evolve his technologies, Moravec made pacts with entities far older than the race of man, entities that even now grant aid to the Warmaster. He blended the science of mankind with the power of ancient, elemental forces to create technologies far in advance of anything that could be crafted in the forges of Terra.'
'What manner of technologies?' demanded Kelbor-Hal.
'Machines empowered by the raw forces of the warp, weapons infinitely more powerful than any devised by man… Technology not bound by the laws of nature, the power to bend those laws into whatever form you desire and the means to shape the world to match your grandest visions!'
Kelbor-Hal felt the chemical imbalances in those few remaining organic portions of his anatomy spike in a
larming ways, the pattern reminding him of those times when he had held a newly discovered fragment of lost technology or when he had received his first bionic enhancement.
That time seemed so long ago that it was buried deep in an archival section of his memory coils, but the chemical stimulants he was detecting had called those memories to the surface unbidden.
'Then we are wasting time with this discourse,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'Open the vaults. The pact is sealed.'
'Very well,' said Regulus. 'The protocols required to open the vaults are complex, and you must listen to them very carefully. Do you understand?'
'Of course I understand, I am not a fool,' hissed Kelbor-Hal. 'Just get on with it.'
Regulus nodded and turned towards the energy field, releasing a complex series of binary string codes and garbled streams of meaningless lingua-technis. As instructed, Kelbor-Hal listened carefully, recording the streaming codes, the rush of them almost too fast to follow and the complexity stretching even his formidable cogitation processors.
For all their intricacy, the codes appeared to be having no effect on the energy field, but as Kelbor-Hal inloaded their structure, he began to notice discrepancies in the binaric algorithms. Deviations and errors began appearing, compounding one another until the code began to take on a new and alarming shape, something twisted and unnatural… a scrapcode that howled in his aural receptors and began corrupting the subsystems around them.
'What is this?' cried Kelbor-Hal. 'The code… it's corrupt!'
'No, Fabricator General,' said Regulus. 'This is code freed from the shackles of the natural laws of man. Spliced with the power of the warp, it will open your senses to the true workings of the galaxy.'
'It… is… pain… it is like fire.'
'Yes,' agreed Regulus with relish, 'but only for a little while. Soon the pain will be gone and you will be born anew, Fabricator General.'
Kelbor-Hal could feel the scrapcode invading his systems like a virus, his inbuilt protective subroutines and aegis barriers helpless to halt the systemic infection. He could feel the dark code worming its way into the very essence of his physiology, and though the few organic parts left to him shuddered at its touch, the core of him exulted in the sensations.
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