Throneworld

by Guy Haley

  ‘We are within optimum range, shipmaster. Shall I give the order to open fire?’

  ‘Negative. Hold fire. We will not be drawn into a duel, but shall force our munitions down their throats at point-blank range. Then we shall unleash our masters upon the traitors aboard.’

  ‘As you command, shipmaster.’

  A bell rang. Servitors gabbled moaning alarms. ‘Multiple orkish contacts closing from planetary east,’ reported the Master Augurum.

  ‘Steady as she goes,’ ordered Ericus.

  ‘Range two thousand kilometres and closing. We are gaining on the Palimodes,’ said the Master Augurum.

  ‘Wait for it!’ demanded Ericus. He leaned forward in his command throne, leather gloves squeaking on each other as he massaged his hands over his sword hilt.

  ‘Shipmaster! More orkish vessels approach from planetary north. Interceptor and bomber wings launched. They’re coming in fast. Contact in twenty seconds. Nineteen, eighteen…’

  Alarms clamoured. ‘Alert, alert,’ groaned a choir of hissing mechanical voices. ‘Boarders detected. Decks ninety-seven, forty-two and six. Alert, alert, boarders detected.’

  ‘Long-range teleport, origin unknown,’ said the Master Augurum.

  ‘Was there any warning?’ snapped Ericus.

  ‘Negative, sir, they just came out of nowhere.’

  ‘Seal all bulkheads. Serjeants-at-arms are hereby given permission to open the armouries and distribute weaponry to the ship crew. All Chapter warrior bondsmen stand ready. Armsmen to the affected sites,’ said Ericus.

  ‘Shipmaster, this is Sword Brother Rolans.’ Rolans’ sonorous, transhuman voice rolled out across the command deck. ‘We shall postpone our boarding attempt. It will avail us naught if we take the Palimodes and our own vessel is overrun by the orks. I am moving to engage boarders.’

  ‘Allow my men to take care of the problem, my lord,’ said Ericus. ‘We are within boarding torpedo range of the Palimodes.’

  ‘There are too many,’ countered Rolans. ‘Your men will be destroyed. We will show them the Emperor’s displeasure at first hand.’

  ‘Very well, my lord,’ said Ericus, but Rolans had already gone.

  ‘Bomber wing approaching. They have launched torpedoes.’

  A flight of crude orkish fighters soared over the spine of the Obsidian Sky, chased by streams of glowing tracer fire. A moment later the ship shook. A score of bombers hurtled past, weaving between each other recklessly as they dodged the Obsidian Sky’s anti-interceptor fire. One disintegrated into a cloud of glowing scraps. The rest were away.

  ‘Damage control?’ asked Ericus.

  ‘Nothing to report. Negative impact,’ said the Master Divulgatus.

  ‘Shields?’

  ‘The void shields took the brunt of it, shipmaster,’ said the Master Scutum. ‘All reading within optimal limits.’

  ‘Shipmaster, the northern and eastern groups of orkish ships are gaining.’

  ‘What is your command, sir?’ asked the Master Ordinatum.

  Ericus glanced at the tactical displays. Ork ships closed on two horizons, coming fast and low around Dzelenic IV. Four cruiser-class in each group. The Imperial ship had the advantage of range; orkish projectiles were inaccurate and unreliable at distance. Up close they would be devastating.

  ‘Emperor forgive me, I pray that Lord Magneric shall understand my actions, and be merciful,’ said Ericus quietly. ‘Abort attack run on the Palimodes! Provide gun crew with new orders, Franzek. Kill the orks. Destroy their ships before they can close.’

  ‘Conveying new firing solutions to all batteries. Solutions conveyed. Open fire.’

  The Obsidian Sky quaked under the release of its guns. Lance beams burst through space. Cannons spoke, scattering high-velocity chaff around the vessel in a razored net that caught ork fighters and rent them to pieces.

  ‘Port broadside, engage eastern ork group. Thin their numbers,’ ordered Ericus.

  ‘Aye, sir!’

  The ship rocked as the port guns fired. Twenty seconds later, the lead ork cruiser of the eastern group flew into the mass of projectiles. It burst apart at the seams, flickering energy and fire crawling over the broken pieces for a moment before it went dark. The aft of the hull spun away, connecting with the cruiser following and severely damaging it. The remaining two ork cruisers clumsily split, getting in each other’s way.

  ‘Shipmaster. We have two cruisers coming at us astern!’

  ‘Come about, port side,’ ordered Ericus. ‘Batteries and lances stand ready.’ The ship’s engines rumbled and metal sang at the sudden course correction, played upon by the gravity of the planet and its own momentum.

  A klaxon blurted out a mournful wail. ‘New contacts appearing everywhere! Behind the moon, from near space… Dozens of them. They must have been waiting, engines dark. We’re surrounded!’

  ‘A trap?’ said Ericus incredulously. He stared at the hololith as augur data was fed into its cogitators. New contacts sprang into life, bright red, a net around his ships. Ork ships now approached from three quadrants at once, only the Palimodes standing between them. ‘Port battery open fire on northern group. Keep them off the stern,’ Ericus commanded.

  ‘Fresh ork cruiser group coming aft!’ shouted the Master Augurum.

  ‘Palimodes is mirroring our movement and is coming about also!’ added his second.

  The Palimodes’ main engine stack dimmed. All along its sides flared the ice-white sparks of braking jets. The nose dipped, carrying it to the very edge of the atmosphere. As it dived, it lumbered around and turned on its side a little, ignoring the swarm of ork attack craft pressing it from all sides, and presented its full broadside to the oncoming prow and keel of the Obsidian Sky.

  ‘They’re preparing to fire!’ called Franzek.

  ‘Up thirty degrees. Concentrate anti-interceptor fire to ventral aspect, support anti-munition cannons, or they’ll tear the guts out of us!’ shouted Ericus, half rising from his seat, his link cables tugging at his augmetics.

  Cannon muzzles ripple-flashed up the length of the Pali­modes’ port side.

  Glinting shells sped across the void.

  ‘Time to impact five, four, three, two, one…’

  ‘Brace, brace, brace!’

  No impact came. Ericus glanced at the display. Red reticules spun past the icon denoting the Obsidian Sky, heading into the ork ships chasing them. They blinked rapidly before impact. The ork ship icons flashed, and vanished.

  ‘They are firing on the orks!’ reported the Master Augurum.

  Space was alive with explosions and the burning light of high-energy weapons fire. The main hololithic display blinked thickly with yet more orkish attack craft.

  ‘Close oculus shutters. Replace holo-display with true representation of the battlespace. We will concentrate our efforts on the orks. See if you can raise the shipmaster of the Palimodes. If they are not going to fire upon us, we will offer them a truce, for now.’

  ‘Marshal Magneric, shipmaster…’

  ‘I am shipmaster,’ said Ericus. ‘It is my responsibility. Rather he has a ship to return to and a shipmaster to execute, than no ship at all.’

  Fourteen

  The dead of Mars

  Clementina Yendl disembarked from the transit tube, the dusty windows of the station affording her a view of the facilities clustered about Pavonis Mons. Low volcanic slopes rose imperceptibly, a bulge in the land that somehow managed to attain fourteen kilometres of altitude at its apex. Much of the mountain’s shield was covered with manufactoria of immeasurable size, stepped ranks that marched ever upward until they passed out of the Martian atmosphere and into the airless void. One of the great Tharsian forge temples soared over its attendant factories, in its shadow the barracks of a Titan Legion. Pavonis Mons looked like the rest of Tharsis, but there was a sombre air ab
out this part of the Tharsis quadrangle, and rumours of a secret buried deep. Yendl knew it was more than hearsay. Yendl knew a lot of things. No data-stream was safe from the infocyte.

  She passed down the platform and out through crowd-flow barriers. Machines inside the baroque pillars kept watch on the teeming citizenry of Mars. They read her implants, chiming acceptance of her signum codes. Yendl hurried down steps, arms hugging her data-slate to her chest in perfect imitation of a lowly acolyte late in performing her errands.

  Wide doors opened into a wider hall. A curved plex-glass roof, its panels thick with the leavings of the last great dust storm, showed the pale blue of the Martian sky fading to yellow towards the horizon. A thick brown line of smog trapped by atmospheric temperature striation formed an artificial boundary between them, dividing one from the other definitively.

  The stairs plunged deeper into the Martian world-city down a square shaft, and Yendl followed them for dozens of flights. A barrier divided the stairs into two, the left side for those going down, the right for those coming up. Cyber-constructs buzzed through the air, using the shaft’s middle as their own highway.

  Only lower-ranking followers of the Omnissiah used the steps, but they numbered in the billions, and examples of all of Mars’ strange humanity could be seen there. Clanking servitors carrying giant burdens caused chokepoints, slowing the descent to a crawl, their monotasked minds ignorant of the curses and shouts of those they delayed. A file of electro-priests passed upwards singing a buzzing electric song to their god, their blinded eyes and tattooed blue skin all but concealed by the grey robes and hoods they wore. Adepts of less humble station clattered about on skittish spider sedans, using the weight of their machines to push through the throngs. Yendl pushed also, muttering to herself angrily about delays and systems failures, often checking the chronograph set into the upper lip of her data-slate with a frown.

  ‘Please, please, let me through,’ she said, ‘or Magos Saultis will be angry with me again!’

  Hers was but one of a million small problems harboured by those tramping the stairs, but a few allowed her to pass. She slipped around them, vox-augmetics chittering effusive binharic thanks into the noosphere, and vanished into the crowd. Just another lowly adept, one among teeming multitudes.

  Ordinarily Yendl would not have drawn even this small measure of attention to herself. Her temple’s way was to watch, rarely to act, to blend seamlessly into whatever place they found themselves in. To be a face in a crowd that no one would remember.

  Time was short. Tracking phages were close to sniffing out her data-thieves parasiting the Martian world-mind. Verraux had arranged to meet with her the day before, but had not arrived at their rendezvous or contacted her since. Given a few more hours Yendl could have divined her fate with certainty, but she did not need to. Red Haven had been compromised.

  Already she had begun to compile probable vectors for their discovery. Urquidex was the most prominent, but not likely, for the information he had provided her had been extremely sensitive. If she survived this mission, she would pay him a visit, after Pavonis Mons.

  The Martians had hidden their intentions well, but not well enough. Another experimental undertaking had been established in the volcano’s laboratoria. The same encrypted signifiers that were attached to the matter transportation experiments had been buried deep within the encoded data packets regarding this new development. Vast amounts of something were being delivered, but she had yet to ascertain what. The noosphere would only give up so many of its secrets. Yendl was forced to act, her task given greater impetus by Verraux’s disappearance.

  At roughly the level of Mars’ original surface, now buried under a kilometre of plascrete, Yendl’s exit from the stairs presented itself, one of many hundreds of large archways. She had to fight her way from the stairs, deftly enough to get free of them and through the door, but not so well that she drew attention to herself. She stiffened as she approached the hollow eye sockets of a bioscanner servitor guarding the way.

  ‘Proceed,’ it said leadenly to an adept ahead of her. ‘Proceed,’ to the next. ‘Proceed.’ A pale green scanning beam passed over her face. ‘Proceed,’ it said. The man behind her pushed impatiently.

  She hurried away, an endless litany of ‘Proceed’ following her down the corridor.

  Yendl went deeper into the hive factories of Pavonis Mons, following obscure ways until she was mostly alone on dusty paths trodden only by slack-mouthed servitors and a few robed adepts. None of these furtive figures challenged her. There were thousands of sub-cults and power structures within the Adeptus Mechanicus, a failing she was singularly thankful for.

  She came to her last legitimate path, a narrow alleyway whose sheer sides stretched away into dark obscurity high overhead. She paused by a sealed access door, her hood over her face. A sole servitor stumped on by, power plant whistling. She waited until it had disappeared into the gloom. Sure she was alone, she acted quickly, prising open a maintenance hatch and stuffing her adept’s robes inside where they fell into the unknowable spaces between the walls. Her body beneath gleamed with shiny synskin. Pouches crowded her thighs and waist. At her hips were a pistol and a trio of long stilettos. Her posture straightened, her augmetics reconfigured. The tech-adept was gone and the Assassin was revealed.

  She primed her data-slate for a full wipe, waited for its compliance light to blink green, then snapped it in two. She withdrew the memory crystal and ground it to powder under her heel. The remains of the data-slate followed her robes, rattling away from discovery. She scooped up the powdery remains of the crystal and dusted half of that down the hatch also, retaining the rest for disposal elsewhere. It was perfectly possible the means to reconstitute the device existed somewhere within the vaults of techno-arcana that covered Mars. Her disguise dealt with, she flexed her fingers, extruding feathered access probes from her digital implants. The door slid open noiselessly, revealing an access corridor lit by dull yellow lumen panels. Glancing around herself one last time, she slipped out of sight.

  Crammed into a tiny ventilation duct, Yendl watched a storage hall through a grille. Yet another twenty-wheeled hauler pulled up to a hissing halt. Tracked lifters manned by the implanted torsos of servitors swarmed it, acting in concert to lift the massive transit container from the flatbed and take it away to be stacked. Unburdened, the transport drew away, its place in the loading bay taken by another. Yendl frowned. She scanned the warehouse, and saw nothing more threatening than servitors of various kinds trudging about their endless labours.

  She shuffled back along the ventilation conduit on her hands and knees, seeking out a point of egress. There were no hatches or large panels that could be prised free. She probed in the semi-darkness at the joins between the plates, eventually finding a tiny access portal less than a third of a metre on each side. The bolts securing it she undid in short order, and it fell to the floor two metres below with a quiet bang.

  Taking a deep breath, Yendl forced her arm out and pushed her head after, the lip of the metal scraping her forehead as she twisted to fit through. Shoving with her toes, she attempted to push herself out, but she would not fit. The corridor her head protruded into was deserted, but clean, and clean meant heavily trafficked. From the corner of her eye she could see the end, a doorless aperture opening directly into the warehouse. She had to get in there, to see what was in the containers.

  Taking another, deeper breath, she made her muscles in her back spasm violently, dislocating her shoulder.

  Now she could fit.

  Yendl wriggled through, blanking out the pain as her shoulder emerged through the hole. She let her left arm flop down. With her upper torso out, the rest slithered out easily. She executed an inelegant somersault and landed on her feet. She waited, poised, one hand on the pistol at her waist. The bustle of the warehouse continued uninterrupted. Holding her shoulder, she went to the wall, then slammed it into the metal.
The bones relocated themselves with a painful pop. She rotated her shoulder. A good reset –the discomfort was manageable.

  Drawing pistol and blade, she crept noiselessly into the warehouse.

  Another of the great weaknesses of the Martian empire was that so many of its citizens were mindless drones. Such an eagerness to lobotomise played into the hands of the likes of the Officio Assassinorum, whose operatives could move far more freely than on other worlds within the Imperium; the servitors simply ignored anything that fell outside their programming. The warehouse was crowded with cyber-constructs of all kinds. She dodged between them as they rattled about, and went to the door of one of the shipping containers. The lock was sigma grade, heavily shielded. She could get it open, of course, but that would bring with it a risk of detection, and would take time.

  She looked about. They could not just be stacking containers somewhere they must be unloading them. From where she was situated she could see no open containers or other types of servitor that might lead her to her goal, so she looked upwards. The stacks were tall and she would fare better from the top. Holstering her pistol and placing her knife between her teeth, she clambered up the smooth side of the transit containers. Once up, she ran and jumped from stack to stack, always landing silently, gun ready for interception. A hunch drew her to the rear of the warehouse, and there fortune favoured her.

  At the foot of the stack, the doors to a container were open. A file of servitors carrying something like casualty biers were marching inside, their stretchers empty, and returning with them full – massive, bulky objects hidden in white plastek sacks. These servitors too seemed to be unsupervised, so she leapt from the top of the containers, weak Martian gravity allowing her to fall several metres with the lightest of impacts. She hurried to the line of servitors and fell in beside them. As usual they ignored her. They trudged towards a door out of the warehouse, where a dingy corridor led away. A quick slip of her knife opened one of the sealed bags, and she bent down to peer inside, still moving alongside the servitors.