'Then let's just hope it works,' said Dalia, looking at the distant, serene features of Jonas Milus.
'Terran horizon clear,' said an automated voice. 'Astronomican light readings approaching test window parameters. Alignment on track.'
'Removing pentobarbital wards from psychic foci,' said the toneless voice of a calculus-logi. 'Increasing aperture of pineal antenna.'
'Magma generators diverting power to collectors.'
'What do all those things mean?' asked Dalia.
'You remember I told you that it takes a great deal of energy to breach the walls separating us from the aether?' said Zeth.
'Yes.'
'Well, it takes a form and amount of energy that cannot be generated here on Mars.'
'What kind of energy?'
'Psychic energy,' said Zeth, 'in quantities that can only be harvested from one source, the Astronomican.'
'The Emperor's warp beacon? The one that guides starships?'
'The very same,' said Zeth, pointing towards the metallic disc at the dome's apex, from which golden spears of energy were arcing. 'Only the Astronomican has the required psychic energy that will allow the Akashic reader to access the sum of all knowledge we seek. We will divert a fraction of its power into the chamber to empower the psykers and open the gates to the aether.'
'Won't it disrupt the Astronomican if we use its power?' asked Dalia.
Zeth looked over at Maximal, a moment's hesitation giving Dalia the answer she sought.
'It will,' admitted Zeth, 'but only for a short span of time.'
Dalia stepped towards the consoles that operated the Akashic reader, assimilating what Zeth had just told her into her understanding of what was being said and what the words carved into the wooden panels meant.
She had no real idea of how powerful the Astronomican was, but understood that even a fraction of its energy would be greater than anything she could imagine. She looked into the chamber at the waking psykers and knew with sudden, awful, clarity that she had overlooked something.
'How are you going to divert the Astronomican's power?' she asked.
'Mars will be in alignment with Terra soon and we will pass through the radiance of the psychic beacon. The pineal antennae will collect the energy and divert it to the psykers.'
'Is that how you've always done it?' asked Dalia urgently.
Adept Zeth shook her head. 'No. This will be the first time we have passed through the Astronomican.'
'Oh no,' whispered Dalia. 'The calculations are wrong. They're all wrong!'
'Wrong, what are you talking about?' demanded Adept Maximal.
'The energy readings,' said Dalia. 'I understand now… the different readings. Fluctuating maximums and minimums. Apogee and perigee… That's why the numbers were different. We assumed a baseline average, but that's not what we're going to get now.'
'Dalia, explain yourself,' said Zeth. 'Talk me through your concerns.'
'The raw data you gave us to work with…' said Dalia. 'I based the upper levels of assumed energy transference on the psychic strengths you've used so far, but this time the energy levels will be hundreds… thousands of times greater than before. The reader used fragments of reflected and refracted psychic bleed… scraps and trickles of psychic energy, but this is going to be a raging torrent!'
'Psychic confluence in five, four…'
'Adept Zeth,' said Dalia, tearing her eyes from Jonas Milus and spinning to face the Mistress of the Magma City. 'We have to stop this. It's going to be too much!'
'Don't be ridiculous,' said Zeth. 'We cannot stop it.'
'You have to!' begged Dalia. 'Please! It's only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.'
'Three, two, one…' continued the countdown.
'No… Oh, Throne, no!' cried Dalia, turning back to the domed chamber.
Blinding light, brighter than a million suns, flooded the chamber of the Akashic reader as the full might of the Astronomican poured its energies through the coffers and into the blind psykers.
Shouts of alarm and warning klaxons blared almost immediately.
And over it all, Dalia could hear the agonised screaming of Jonas Milus.
The desolate uplands between the volcanoes of the Tharsis Montes were bare of structures or habitation. Any landscape habitually trodden by the god engines of the Legios was crushed flat by the unimaginable weight of the titanic war machines. The only artificial creations were those placed there by Legio servitors to act as target practice.
The land between Ascraeus Mons and Pavonis Mons was rugged and inhospitable, an area of demarcation between two warrior orders who shared a region of Mars but little else. A few of the nomadic vassal tribes that plied the ashen wastelands between the great forges of the adepts had tried to found settlements there, but even they were forced to concede that living in the shadow of the Titan fortresses was untenable.
The great golden gateway of the Legio Tempestus fortress at the end of the Ascraeus Chasmata stood open, and three titanic engines, resplendent in their cobalt blue armour plates, marched out. Kill totems and trailing honour banners billowed on their weapons and from enormous masts fitted to their carapaces.
Metallus Cebrenia, the engine of Princeps Sharaq, led them out, followed by its smaller siblings, the Warhounds Raptoria and Astrus Lux. All three machines were fully armed and ready to fight, their gun-servitors and auto-loaders cycled up to battle readiness. A host of bestial, armoured Skitarii divisions swarmed at the base of the canyon, but Sharaq knew that they would be of little use in any engine fight that might develop.
Only a fraction of the Tempestus Skitarii remained on Mars, but Aeschman, the commander of the Martian divisions, had demanded the right to march out with the engines, and Sharaq wasn't about to deny the towering brute the chance to lead his augmented warriors.
To march out with such a force was almost unheard of on Mars, but with tensions running high in the Tharsis region, Princeps Sharaq was taking no chances with the security of the Legio's fortress.
With Princeps Senioris Cavalerio protecting the reactors of Ipluvien Maximal, Sharaq was next in the chain of command and the security of Ascraeus Mons was his responsibility.
He just wished he had more engines to secure it with.
Two Warhounds and a Reaver fresh from refit was no force to protect an entire base, not when the engines of Mortis were walking.
Cavalerio's battle group was on its way back, but a ferocious dust storm had blown out of the west from the slopes of the Great Mountain to confound the auspex, so, for all intents and purposes, Sharaq was on his own.
Did Mortis have violence in mind? Sharaq didn't know and just hoped this was another of Camulos's posturing walks to demonstrate his Legio's favour on Mars.
'Dolun?' asked Sharaq. 'Where are they?' He didn't need to clarify who he meant.
'Getting engine returns and heat blooms from four or five engines, my princeps,' said his sensori, feeding the information to Sharaq through the Manifold. The view through the cabin windows was a swirling, seething mass of orange and brown dust particles, the smooth-finished rock of the canyon sides barely visible in the gloom.
Sharaq needed no visual cues to command the Metallus Cebrenia, for he was navigating and driving his engine via the sensorium of the Manifold, a much more reliable source of information than the poor sense of his eyes.
'I estimate sixty kilometres out, closing fast,' said Dolun. 'Possible four engines, striding speed or better.'
'Throne, they're big,' hissed Moderati Bannan.
'Warlords,' said Sharaq. 'Three of them. And maybe a Reaver.'
'Probably,' noted Bannan. 'But that heat bloom in the centre… it's too big for one engine. Might be another marching in close formation. They could be trying to hide another engine.'
'Dolun?' queried Sharaq. 'What do you make of that assessment?'
'Could be, but the void returns I'm getting don't look like separate tracks. It's hard to tell, the storm
s blowing in from the west are messing with every piece of surveyor gear I've got.'
'Keep on it,' ordered Sharaq, flexing his fists in their sheaves of steel and wire. A rumbling thunder vibrated along the great pistons and cogs of Metallus Cebrenia's colossal frame as the god-machine sensed his anticipation through the Manifold. Cebrenia was an old machine, a grand dam of the Legio with an enviable honour roll, but she had faltered in her last battle and taken severe damage.
The journey back to Mars for refit and repair had been difficult for both man and machine, and Sharaq could feel the pressure to perform in this engagement.
'Any word from Mortis?' he demanded. 'Any response to our hails?'
'Negative, my princeps,' replied Bannan. 'I'm just getting static. Could be the storm is playing with the vox, but I doubt it.'
'What about the Stormlord? Any word from Princeps Cavalerio?'
'Last transmission we had said they were heading back at flank speed,' said Bannan. 'Nothing since then.'
'Come on, Indias,' whispered Sharaq. 'I can't hold the Chasmata with a Reaver and two Warhounds.'
He returned his attention to the Manifold, trying to make some sense of the squalls and interference that fogged his perceptions of the world around his engine.
The Martian networks had been jammed for days with scrappy, fragmentary code blurts that appeared to have no point of origin, and which ghosted around the system before vanishing just as inexplicably.
'Adept Eskund, reduce reactor power twelve per cent,' ordered Sharaq. 'Bannan, bring us to one third. Hold us at the mouth of the canyon.'
'Yes, my princeps,' said Bannan, easing down on their speed.
Sharaq opened the Manifold to the princeps of the two Warhounds and said, 'Kasim, Lamnos.'
Ghostly images, rippling and unsteady, formed in the air before Sharaq's eyes: Kasim, the swarthy-skinned predator, and Lamnos, the ambusher who killed from the shadows. Both warriors worked well together, Kasim fighting with the aggression of a hunter to flush prey towards the killing fire of his brother-in-arms.
'Princeps Sharaq,' said Kasim, his voice thick with the accent of the hives of Phoenicus Lacus. 'You have hunting orders?'
'Maybe,' said Sharaq. 'Spread out and run a criss-cross search pattern out towards the last fix we had on Mortis. I want to know where those damned engines are.'
'Are we to engage?' asked Lamnos, and Sharaq almost laughed at the eagerness he heard in his fellow princeps voice.
'Your courage is admirable, Lamnos, but if Mortis are coming in the strength I think they are, a pair of Warhounds won't stop them.'
'Then we just let them march on our fortress unopposed?' demanded Kasim.
'We don't know where they're marching yet,' Sharaq reminded his bellicose Warhound drivers. 'They may swing westwards and carry on north to the Olympica Fossae assembly yards. Or they could bear east towards Mondus Occulum. We don't know.'
'They will rue the day if they cross the Tempest Line,' snarled Lamnos.
'Yes, they will,' agreed Sharaq, 'but until they do and are within our engagement zone, you are not to fire unless fired upon. I won't have Camulos saying we started an engine war on Mars thanks to a headstrong Tempest driver. Understood?'
Both princeps grumbled their assent and Sharaq shut down the link between them as the Warhounds loped off into the wind-whipped ash and dust.
Dalia raced from the control room, chased by screaming alarm bells and the blinding light of the Astronomican. Howling cants of binary squealed and the air foamed with torrents of panicked data streams.
Tears spilled down her cheeks as she heard the agonised screaming of Jonas Milus, the sound echoing from the front of her skull to the innermost reaches of her psyche. Dalia had promised herself that he would be safe, that her work would not see him killed in the name of scientific progress.
That promise had been reduced to ashes and she couldn't bear the sound of his screams. She passed into the towering shaft chamber that rose up to the Magma City, seeing that the low archway in the silver wall was now filled with a great bronze gate. She ran towards it, molten light spilling through a circular window in its centre.
'No!' she cried. 'No! He's dying!'
She beat her fists on the metal door, bruising the flesh of her hands and drawing blood where she clawed at the glass with her fingernails. Dalia pressed her face to the window, straining to see anything through the dazzling brightness that filled the chamber and rendered what was happening within invisible.
'Open the door!' screamed Dalia. 'Open the damn door! We have to stop this!'
Dalia rushed to the keypad at the side of the door and began punching in the code required to open it. She had not been made privy to the doorway's code, but had skimmed the access protocols from Zeth's noospheric aura.
Further warning alarms shrilled and a pulsating amber light began to strobe angrily.
She felt a restraining hand on her arm and angrily threw it off.
'You can't go in there!' shouted a voice at her ear: Caxton's.
'I have to!' she wailed. 'He's dying. Oh, Throne we're killing him!'
'It's not your fault,' said Caxton, drawing her arms back from the door before she could punch in the final sequence of digits and turning her away from the light streaming through the window. 'It's not your fault.'
'It is, it is,' sobbed Dalia, burying her face in Caxton's shoulder and holding him tightly, as if the force of her grip could somehow end the horror. 'We need to get in there.'
'You can't,' said Caxton. 'Not yet. You're not soul-bound!'
'I don't care! I need to get in there!'
'No! The psychic energy will kill you if you go through that door.'
'Like it's killing them!' said Dalia. 'I've got to!'
She pushed Caxton away and entered the last digits of the access sequence.
Like a rolling surge tide, the light boiled out from the chamber of the Akashic reader, and Dalia plunged into the roaring blizzard of psychic power.
Princeps Kasim felt the savage glee of Raptoria as he pushed her to flank speed. Like him, Raptoria was glad to be walking beneath the sky, unfettered and armed for war. The between times when she languished in oily ship holds, restrained by scaffolds and manacled to the deck, had been a cage for her warlike heart, a cell for an angry killer that had denied her sublime skills as a hunter.
This was her first walk since returning to Mars for repairs, and Kasim felt the urge to kill in every piston, gear and metal joint of his mount. He looked down at the golden skull and cog medallion that hung around his neck and wished that he could reach up and touch it for luck, but his hands were encased in wire-wound haptic sheaths.
Princeps Cavalerio, the Stormlord himself, had presented Kasim with the medallion, honouring him in front of the Legio as they boarded the ships for Mars after the brutal, hard-fought campaign of the Epsiloid Binary Cluster.
Six engines had been lost and many wounded, including the already battle-scarred Victorix Magna, the towering war machine of the Stormlord.
Cavalerio had brought the badly wounded engines of the Legio back to Mars, leaving the bulk of Tempestus under the command of Princeps Maximus Karania. Months of labour by the Legio artisans had seen the damaged engines repaired and brought back to their former glory.
With the refit works virtually complete the Legio was ready to transfer back to the expedition fleet, to once more extend the rightful domain of the Imperium. Kasim eagerly awaited the Legio's return to the forefront of the fighting, for Mars had changed in the years since Tempestus had led its war machines across its umber plains.
No longer was Mars united in the dream of the Great Crusade. The clan-forges and magi had fallen to petty squabbling and spiteful acts of violence, dragging the red planet into an age of suspicion and mistrust.
Even the warrior orders had changed, forming factions and isolated bands of martial strength to protect what resources they controlled. Mortis had been no exception, extending their control through t
he guise of protection to many of the smaller forges and more easily pressured warrior orders.
No, the sooner Tempestus could get back to the real work of the galaxy the better.
'Where are they?' he hissed, bringing his Warhound about and angling his course to intersect with that of Astrus Lux. The view from his canopy was mostly obscured by the billowing ash storm, the thick, armoured glass streaked with a dusty residue that was the bane of cogs and gears.
'Twenty kilometres, my princeps,' said Moderati Vorich. 'Signal returns growing in strength, but they keep fading in and out… as if there's some kind of interference pushing out just ahead of them.'
'Keep us steady,' warned Kasim. 'And keep a close eye on the sensoria, they'll probably have Warhound pickets as well.'
'Yes, my princeps.'
Kasim felt the power beneath him, the fiery heart of Raptoria straining at his commands and anxious for the hunt proper to begin.
'Soon,' he whispered.
Kasim was relying on hard implants and the myriad surveyor apparatus fed information to him via the MIU, data flowing directly into his cerebral cortex as streams of neurons.
So far, Raptoria was running only passive scans, the better to hide her presence in the storm. An active scan of the area would reveal more of their surroundings, but would as good as announce their presence to any undiscovered hunters.
In such conditions, a Warhound lived and killed by its stealth - as strange as the concept of such a huge machine being stealthy might appear - and Kasim trusted his instincts to keep Raptoria safe. The interference plaguing the sensoria was troubling, and he could feel Raptoria's unease in the skittishness of her controls.
All his other senses were undimmed. He could feel the nearness of princeps Lamnos's engine, the bite of the dust on Raptoria's hull, and taste the oily, ashen flavour of the wind as it howled around him.
Somewhere out in the dust was the enemy, even if they hadn't been classified as such yet, but Kasim couldn't see them or know how close they were. Such situations were a Titan driver's worst nightmare; that your enemy could be plotting a firing solution without you even knowing he was there.
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