Gods of Mars
Page 14
Echoes were his only answer.
Vitali reached out to the light.
It bloomed around him in an explosion of magnificent colour. Stellar mist and starlight surrounded him with the wondrous ellipses of planetary orbits, glittering nebulae and the pulse of reflected starlight that was already centuries old.
And there she was, standing in the slow-arcing parabola of Quatria itself, just as Vitali remembered her. Untouched by the fires that had taken her limbs and melted the skin from her bones. Whole again. Without any trace of the nightmarish excisions Galatea had wrought on her.
She smiled, and what remained of his heart broke once again.
‘Linya…’ he said, hoping against hope he wasn’t suffering from some cruel, grief-induced hallucination or floodstream leak into his cranial cavity.
Father.
No. The tone of her voice. The warmth. The slight upturn at the corner of her mouth and the crease of flesh beneath her eyes. They all told Vitali that this truly was Linya.
‘Linya, Ave Deus Mechanicus… I’m so sorry,’ he sobbed, but Linya held up her hand. ‘I–’
I don’t have much time, father. Galatea’s neuromatrix is pervasive, and it won’t be long before it detects this transmission. Hexamathics, that’s how we’ll beat it.
‘I don’t understand. Hexamathics, what about it?’
It can’t process it. It doesn’t know how. That’s how I’m able to speak to you now.
Vitali struggled to process his conflicting feelings. The analytical part of his brain recognised the risk she must be taking to project herself into this space, but the paternal part of him wanted nothing more than to hold her and tell her how much he missed her.
‘I can’t fight Galatea,’ he said.
You have to, you can’t allow it to exist. It’s too dangerous.
‘It said it would extinguish your essence,’ said Vitali. ‘I can’t risk that. I won’t lose you twice.’
Linya’s expression softened and she held her hand out to him. Vitali went to take it, and for a fleeting second it seemed as though he felt a measure of bio-feedback from the light.
But then it vanished, no more substantial than a hologram.
Forge Elektrus. You need to find it, that’s the key.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Vitali. ‘What key?’
It’s where you’ll find someone whose light can hurt Galatea in the datascape, someone who can keep it from seeing what I’m assembling.
Vitali nodded, though he had no real idea what Linya meant.
‘Forge Elektrus,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. What else?’
Before she could say any more, Linya looked over her shoulder with a look of alarm at something out of sight.
I love you.
And then she was gone.
In theory, each of the Tindalosi were equal, but theory and reality were quite different. The first hunter Telok had awoken had always been the leader of this pack, even before there was a pack. Its inception date was centuries earlier than the others, when the mystery of its creation was still a jealously guarded secret.
Its bulk was greater, its armour accreted with patchwork repairs from the time when it had needed such attention. Its neural network was a hybridised collection of heuristic kill-memes and automated pattern recognition arrays. It had not been conceived with the capacity for autonomic reasoning, but the frequency-fractal processes of its supramolecular system architecture swiftly became capable of self-aware thought.
Its name was the result of a rogue decimal point within its ultra-rapid cognitive evolution, like a grain of sand caught in an oyster. Around that arithmetical error, a name grafted onto its awareness of self.
It called itself Vodanus.
Once it had hunted alone. It had slain the great orbital AI of Winterblind and torn the heart from the Arc-Nexus Emperor of a world that would go on to be known as Fortis Binary. But like most things in war, especially new and efficient forms of mass murder, what had once been unique, became almost commonplace. The enemies of its aeons-dead masters developed their own form of hellhounds, and the proliferation of such lethal assassins ended the forgotten conflict for which they had been created. What war could be fought when any commander would be hunted down and slaughtered within hours of their appointment?
But even with the war’s end, the lightning was out of the bottle and resisted being put back. Some hungers, once awoken, can never entirely be satiated. The hellhounds compiled kill lists of their own, and waged individual campaigns of annihilation.
The hellhounds’ newly united creators finally trapped their creations into automated void-hulks, devoid of life or viable prey. They hurled them into the hearts of stars and did their best to forget the monsters they had birthed ever existed.
A faulty drive saved the vessel bearing Vodanus from its appointed death. Drifting beyond the frontier of its former empire, its creators bid Vodanus good riddance. And so it had been for uncounted millennia, sealed in a cold tomb that slowly decayed and eroded the hellhounds’ existence one by one until only six remained.
Only the most astronomical odds saw the void-hulk drift into the celestial arena of Telok’s testing grounds. To detect a cold slab of virtually inert metal in the vastness of space was next to impossible, but the stellar surveys in preparation for the Breath of the Gods’ activation were necessarily precise.
And so the drifting void-hulk had been salvaged by Telok’s inter-system fleets and the Tindalosi were once again yoked into service as hunter-killers.
The six of them swept into the distribution hub like glittering, earthbound comets, claws extended and every augur sweeping for the code-trace they had torn from the Thunderhawk. That scent was already fading, and with every second of its diminishment, their pain grew in direct response.
The impossibly complex planetary schematics of Exnihlio named this place as Distribution Hub Rho A113/235, but Vodanus and its Tindalosi cared nothing for names.
All that drove them was hunger.
Every screed of their being ached to drink the prey’s code. Their bones were broken glass that could only be restored by the prey’s light. Their minds were ablaze with a fire that could only be quenched in the prey’s death.
A pulse of linked thought from Vodanus sent the Tindalosi racing through the distribution hub, slaloming between grumbling ore-haulers, climbing the scurfed tower-silos and circling the ore hoppers. The hundreds of servitors ignored them, glassy-eyed stares fixated on their labours in unending loops of servitude.
The Tindalosi quartered the area into search grids.
The prey’s scent was here, they could all taste it.
Fleeting hints of it drifted from droplets of floodstream. Where his mechadendrites had brushed the walls, they could sense Locardian fragments of transferred code-bleed.
Vodanus drew in the millions of microscopic traces, building a mental map of the prey and its movements. It looked for patterns, movements and things out of place. What was missing could tell it as much as what it found.
It rose up on its hooked legs, letting the data flood its hunter’s heart. The mind-screams of its brethren echoed in its skull, pleading to be allowed to feed. As if they knew anything of real hunger. Vodanus had slain kings and emperors. All they knew was the bland tasteless kills of lesser beings.
They begged and howled, desperate for their hunger to end.
Vodanus ignored them, loping over to where a yoked gang of servitors shovelled at an ore pit. A last trace of prey lingered here, strong where he had touched one of the master’s machines.
Vodanus reared over the cyborgised humans, its curved spine flaring with micro-cilia sensors. The ore pit was empty, but the servitors dug anyway, their mono-tasked routines clearly expecting it to be full.
An instantaneous inventory of the hub’s roster showed one of its ore-hauler vehicles to be missing. The noosphere showed no record of a reported fault, nor any exloaded docket of maintenance or transfer.
Th
e vehicle’s absence was unauthorised. It had been taken.
Vodanus craned its elongated skull as two of its hellhound companions appeared behind the servitors. Relative to Vodanus, they were barely cubs. New machine souls.
Though their outward form had remained unchanged for millennia, they were lean and athirst. They circled the servitors, butting against them and slicing their leathery skin with quick flicks of finger blades.
The prey had brushed past these cyborg things. Transference had occurred. The hellhounds hungered to kill them, to sup those scraps of scent.
Vodanus snapped and hissed in a mathematical language from a time before the Mechanicus, from the machines of an alien culture.
No Kill. Bad Meat.
They hissed back, hostile and resentful, but obedient. The servitors continued their meaningless work at the empty ore silo, oblivious to the hideous appetite of the hunters circling them.
The prey-scent moved through the hub, and Vodanus had no trouble in following the trail now it knew what to look for. The prey had taken a vehicle, a crude and noisy thing that almost obscured the scent. Had that been the intention?
Could the prey be aware of the hellhounds’ pursuit?
No. The vehicle was simply a means of transport.
Vodanus dropped onto his many limbs and ghosted through the hub in a figure of eight pattern, sifting the competing scents of Exnihlio and triangulating the prey’s likely vector. A ragged red line lifted from the ground beyond the hub, like drifts of smoke in a volcanic cavern.
Its head snapped around as it heard the screech of tearing metal and the meat thud of claws through bone. The two Tindalosi it had warned away loomed over the ruined remains of two servitors. The first hellhound dissected the cyborgs like a gleeful butcher.
Flesh was waste matter, but metallic augments were snapped open. A rust-red extrusion from the hellhound’s skull sucked out the code like a scavenger hollowing marrow from bone.
Vodanus sprinted back to the disobedient Tindalosi. Threat signifiers blazed from it, and the remaining servitors stepped back from its screeching anger. Even they understood the terrible threat of this creature.
It slammed into the observing hellhound.
The impact was ferocious. Metal buckled as it was hurled back.
Overlapping rib plates caved inwards and two of its limbs snapped. It bellowed, but its spine bent in submission as coruscating emerald arcs of light flickered beneath its damaged sections. Its rib plates began unfolding, fresh limbs already extruding from within its archaic frame.
Satisfied this cub had not broken its geas, Vodanus spun around, ready to tear the feasting hellhound from its violation.
It was already too late.
The Tindalosi spasmed, scarlet lines bleeding through its convulsing body like a searing infection. It howled as the force of Telok’s geas prohibitions ripped through it in an indiscriminate storm of destruction. Ancient technologies melted to black slag within its body, trillions of bio-synthetic nerves and cortical synapses burned like fulminate.
Fine black ash poured from its body, inert blood of the machine.
The hellhound literally came apart at the seams, its silver-steel body parts falling into the ore pit in a clatter of components. The gleaming metal blackened as self-immolation protocols released ultra-rapid ferrophage organisms within its atomic structure that necrotised the body utterly.
The Tindalosi gathered around Vodanus. It showed them the prey’s red spoor. Their bodies snapped and grated in anticipation, eager to follow the trail to its source, but it held them fast, forcing them to watch the ashes of their brother scatter in the wind.
Bad. Meat.
Kotov had known his share of truculent machines and resistant code, but the binaric arrangements within the universal assembler were some of the most confounding he had ever encountered. Squirming hives of machine language were buried deep in the system architecture, but without the proper authorisation codes, Kotov could not force the rites of awakening to the command layers of the console.
That hub sat five hundred metres above ground level, atop a central column that rose up within the vast, hollow cylinder of the universal assembler.
Entry to the assembler had been achieved without difficulty, its wide base pierced by numerous rounded archways. Within, the tower was little more than a gargantuan chimney, its internal faces lined with aluminium ducts, none less than seven metres in diameter. These ran the height of the tower, linking to colossal fan mechanisms and filtration rigs before diminishing to a vanishing point high above.
They had been forced to abandon the ore-hauler just beyond one of those arches. The floor space within the tower was too crowded with a gnarled mess of bellowing engines, filters and suction pumps. The air thrummed with the vibration of the tower’s beating heart, and puffs of sulphurous vapours sighed from every engine. The impression was of a host of slumbering beasts, just waiting for an incautious intruder to awaken them.
The eldar had been as good as their word. Even as the Cadians and Black Templars pushed into the universal assembler, Bielanna and her warriors emerged from the surrounding machinery as though they had simply been waiting for them to arrive.
Every surface within the tower glistened with moisture and the air was humid with heavy vapours. Milky deposits gathered on outcroppings of iron and stone, and where they dripped, spiralling stalagmites reared like glassy teeth.
Rising from the heart of the chamber was a towering column with a coiling ramp ascending for half a kilometre in a steep curve. And at the top of that ramp was the activation hub of the universal assembler, a circular gallery with a number of elliptical bridges that led to other towers and structures beyond.
At the centre of the activation hub stood a circular control mechanism, replete with brass dials, winking gem panels and a host of iron-runged activation levers not dissimilar to those found on the bridge of the Tabularium. As archaic a means of activation as this was, Kotov had been relieved to see the hub was at least equipped with inload/exload ports.
While the warriors kept watch for signs of pursuit, Kotov and Pavelka slotted into the control hub. Kotov had told Tanna he believed he could render the universal assembler functional, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Few means of interaction were as pure as communion within a machine. Mortal interactions were an inefficient mix of verbal and somatic cues, with much of the inherent meaning dependent on prior experience, non-verbal inflexions and situational markers.
No such ambiguity existed within Mechanicus dialogues.
To enter communion with another magos was to know them as intimately as a lover – or so Kotov had been told. Their inner thoughts were laid bare, though only the most boorish would reach beyond the conventional boundaries of communion to learn every secret of a fellow magos. Such flows of information were reciprocal; what passed one way could pass the other.
As such, Kotov did not venture beyond the brands of censure he read in Pavelka’s noospheric aura. An archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus was entitled to know every detail of those who served beneath him, but this was neither the time nor the place to exercise that right.
s core.
Kotov hesitated before answering, any admission of failure anathema to him.
Pavelka reached deeper into the machine, her touch light and coaxing. Her binary was gently formed, beguilingly so, and the machine was responding. Kotov formed a matching algorithm of command with his rank signifiers.
One suited to a gentler form of control.
Pavelka’s presence within the machine retreated fractionally, and Kotov wondered if he had stepped over some unknown boundary. Then Pavelka’s focus returned to the matter at hand.
Pavelka signalled her understanding, and Kotov was pleased she saw the logic in his proposal to send the Speranza away.
Kotov felt the required codes rising to the surface layers of the hub, a spiderweb of logarithmic sequences that would trigger the activation of the machines below. He studied each one as it arose, and any hopes that this desperate plan might work turned to ashes as he saw the acausal locks binding them.