Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  Kotov let his approbation flow into the Manifold.

  Where else but in the Adeptus Mechanicus could such singular unity of purpose be found?

  Songs of praise to the Omnissiah flowed around him, double, triple, and even quadruple helix spirals of binary moving effortlessly through the circuitry and data light like a soothing balm. As terrible as the damage would likely prove, the worst was over, and though the loss of even one machine was a solemn blow, Kotov knew they had gotten off lightly.

  He felt the presence of Linya Tychon and directed his data ghost towards the astrogation chamber, where she and her father added their own verses to the healing binaric song. He felt the wash of information that filled the chamber, amazed that none of it had been corrupted in the spasms of digital anarchy that had flowed through the ship in the wake of the accident.

  said Linya.

 

  she replied.

  said Kotov.

  Kotov felt the swell of pride in Linya’s and her father’s floodstreams and moved on to the source of the destructive plasma bolt. His consciousness flowed along the path the searing bolt had traced, lamenting the needless loss of so many fine machines. The lower decks were dead, empty spaces where two entire decks had been vented to bleed the bolt of its sustaining oxygen and ionising atmosphere. Regrettable, but necessary.

  He saw the shattered glassy graveyard of the starboard solar collector and the molten remains of the giant capacitor that stored its gathered energy. The loss of one such system would be bad enough, but to lose both was going to put a serious drain on their available power. Coupled with the loss of one of the main plasma combustion chambers, Kotov suspected the expedition was in very real danger of suffering an unsustainable energy deficit.

  Moving forwards, he saw the devastated training hangar, where Guardsmen, Black Templars and skitarii fought to deal with the hundreds of wounded and dead. Confined in the pressurised environment of the hangar, the backwash of the blast had levelled Dahan’s training arena and killed a great many of the Imperium’s finest. Kotov inloaded the casualty lists, shocked by how many had died and how many were moving from wounded to dead.

  Lupa Capitalina stood at the far end of the hangar, its arms hanging limply by its sides as screaming vents blasted superheated steam into the air above it. Emergency venting of the plasma reactor at its heart, realised Kotov. The crew had shut the Titan down, draining it of every last scrap of power, and hot rain fell around the dormant engine, streaking its vast armoured carapace and drizzling from its drooping head like tears.

  Kotov saw a gaggle of tech-priests and servitors lowering an armoured casket from the Warlord’s opened canopy. They took the greatest of care with its handling, as well they might, for they carried the mortal flesh of Princeps Arlo Luth, Chosen of the Omnissiah and favoured son of battle. Without him, Lupa Capitalina was nothing more than an inert piece of holy metal. The very best of the Adeptus Biologis would work without pause to undo whatever had caused this unfortunate series of events.

  Canis Ulfrica knelt before the Warlord, its right side torn away and fused by the heat of the blast that had felled it. Kotov felt the Reaver’s pain bleeding into the Manifold, but saw that it was by no means beyond saving. Kryptaestrex had the supplies, and Turentek, the Speranza’s Ark Fabricatus, could work miracles with machines thought damaged beyond healing. Amarok and Vilka circled the wounded Titan as hundreds of tech-priests and Legio acolytes swarmed its broken body. Princeps Eryks Skálmöld had already been removed, and his casket rested on a floating gravity palanquin as the chanting priests surrounding him awaited the arrival of the Legio’s Alpha Princeps.

  Even inloading the Manifold records from both Titans gave Kotov little clue as to what had caused Lupa Capitalina to fire on one of its own. He saw it was only the last-minute stimulation of the Warlord’s actuator muscles by Magos Hyrdrith that had thrown its aim off enough to save Canis Ulfrica from complete destruction.

  As Kotov scanned the terrible wreckage of the training hall, he caught a faint, but unmistakable trace element of Magos Dahan’s bio-mechanical scent as it tugged on the edges of the Manifold.

 

  Kotov received no response, but the strength of the mechanised tech-sign grew stronger at the touch of his Manifold-presence. Flitting through the datasphere, Kotov quickly triangulated the source of the tech-sign – a smashed tank, almost entirely buried in the ruins of a fallen structure – and assigned the task of digging it clear to a nearby group of muscle-augmented combat servitors.

  He felt the insistent pull of command requests coming from the bridge and raced back through the conduits of the ship until his consciousness sat once again enthroned in his cerebral cortex. Kotov opened his eyes and let the reassuring warmth of the command deck’s data-sea enfold him.

  ‘Summarise: damage and prognosis,’ he said. ‘Magos Blaylock, begin.’

  ‘The plasma bolt has now been successfully discharged,’ he said. ‘Venting the lower decks was the correct course of action. Despite the loss of numerous mechanical and mortal components – a full list is appended via sub-strata noospheric link – the Speranza is still functionally operational. The loss of crew and power generation will be our biggest concern as the expedition continues. The energy requirement of the Geller field is draining our power reserves too quickly, and at the recommendation of Magos Azuramagelli, I would suggest that we drop out of warp space within the next two hours.’

  ‘How short will that leave us?’ demanded Kotov.

  Azuramagelli answered, his carriage-like armature moving through a floating representation of the Valette system. A number of callipers extended from the rotating rim beneath his brain jars, and a shimmering point of light appeared just beyond the outer edges of the system.

  ‘With Magos Tychon’s added inload capacity, I have calculated an optimal exit point, which will leave us fifteen days beyond the system’s edge.’

  ‘Fifteen days? That is unacceptable, Magos Azuramagelli,’ said Kotov. ‘Find another exit point closer to Valette.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘With the current drain on our energy reserves, there is no way to maintain the Geller field long enough to reach any closer with a safe enough margin of reserve.’

  ‘Damn the reserve,’ said Kotov, hot anger rising from his body in a haze of red floodstream. ‘Find us a closer exit.’

  ‘Magos Azuramagelli is, unfortunately, correct,’ said Saiixek of engineering, pulling a host of data tables and graphs from the air. ‘The loss of the plasma combustion chamber slows us by a factor too great to ignore.’

  ‘And without capacitor reserve, our operational protocols dictate that we cannot run under such conditions,’ added Kryptaestrex. ‘We need to return to real space and unfold the port collector to charge up the remaining capacitor. We’ll likely need to drain half the support ships of fuel and power or we won’t even reach the Halo Scar, let alone get beyond it.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Blaylock. ‘Prudence might dictate that we abandon such an attempt until we are better able to face such a challenge.’

  ‘I wondered when you would suggest that,’ said Kotov.

  ‘Archmagos?’

  ‘Turning back? You’d like nothing better than for us to return to Mars in failure.’

  ‘I assure you, archmagos, I wish us to succeed as much as you.’

  Kotov read no falsehood in Blaylock’s floodstream, but couldn’t quite bring himself to believe his Fabricatus Locum. The moment stretched, and Kotov realised he was out of options.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Make the necessary preparations for a
return to real space.’

  Abrehem, Coyne, Hawke and Crusha made their way through the cavernous transit chambers back towards the lower dormitory decks. The metal floor was slick with moisture and wisps of cold steam drifted from vents that billowed cold air into the arched tunnels.

  ‘This feels weird,’ said Coyne. ‘I always felt these tunnels were claustrophobic.’

  ‘When there’s hundreds of bondsmen trudging to and from work, it’s going to feel cramped,’ said Abrehem, trying not to remember the screams of the dying men in the reclamation chamber as the plasma wave engulfed them.

  ‘It’s cold too,’ said Hawke.

  ‘Yeah, and the air tastes funny,’ added Coyne.

  ‘It tastes... clean...’ said Abrehem, surprised he’d not noticed that. It had been so long since he’d tasted air that hadn’t been scrubbed through labouring filters or wasn’t laced with dust and toxins that he’d forgotten what clean air tasted like.

  ‘Maybe they’ve had a system purge after what happened?’ suggested Coyne.

  ‘Not likely,’ said Hawke.

  ‘Then what do you think happened?’

  ‘Like I care,’ said Hawke. ‘If the air’s cleaner then that’s great, but I don’t give a shiprat’s fart why it’s happened.’

  Abrehem shook his head. ‘No, the air’s not just clean, it’s cold. I mean, really cold. Like it’s been frozen. And it’s hard, like it’s, I don’t know, stale or something.’

  The others had no answer for him, and they walked the rest of the way in silence, along echoing tunnels lit through stained-glass lancets by dancing flames, down skull-stamped stairs of iron, through yawning portals fringed with carved stone cogs and past heaving ranks of relentless pistons.

  They saw no one to offer an explanation for the emptiness.

  Here and there, Abrehem saw discarded pieces of maintenance machinery fixed to the deck, but without anyone around to operate them. The more pressure hatches they passed through the more frequent the signs of something amiss became.

  None of them had paid much attention to their surroundings since becoming bondsmen, and the omnipresent exhaustion had quickly drained them of any curiosity to look around. But without the press of bodies around them and the sudden clarity that comes from a near death experience, all three men felt a mounting apprehension as they approached their dormitory deck.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Hawke.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ said Coyne, echoing Abrehem’s thoughts exactly.

  At last they reached the cavernous opening to the feeding hall, and as the airtight gate ground down into the deck, a wall of piled-up bodies tumbled into the passageway, like water over a collapsing dam. Freezing air gusted over the dead, and Abrehem backed away from the spilling corpses; men and women in the grimy coveralls of Mechanicus bondsmen. The bodies were pale, lips cyanotic, eyes wide with the pain and terror of sudden decompression and asphyxiation. Fingernails were bloody where desperate hands had clawed at the gate.

  ‘Thor’s blood,’ said Hawke, as the sliding heap of bodies came to a halt. ‘What the hell happened here?’

  ‘They’re all dead...’ said Coyne.

  Abrehem felt the cold of the air clamp around his soul as he finally understood the cause of the freezing chill in the surrounding tunnels. He looked up the cliff-face walls at the gently rotating fan blades of the air-circulation vents. Strips of inscribed parchment fluttered from the louvres, prayers of purity and imprecations for untrammelled transit of air. Those prayers had been hideously mocked, and he tried not to imagine the horror of the men and women as the vents had reversed and drawn air instead of providing it.

  ‘The bastards!’ he cried, wrapping his arms around his scrawny frame. First the deaths in the reclamation chamber, and now this! How much could one man be expected to bear?

  ‘How did this happen?’ said Coyne, not yet reaching the inevitable conclusion offered by the blue-lipped corpses.

  Crusha opened a path through the dead, lifting each body aside and showing surprising gentleness for one so monstrously bulked and so seemingly simple. Abrehem followed the ogryn and Hawke into the feeding hall, letting his eyes roam the empty ranks of tables, the monstrous silence and the scattered ruin of plastek trays. Servitors lay dead next to their serving machines, and while most of the bodies were piled high at the chamber’s three gates, many others were lying slumped below the air-circulation vents, perhaps in the vain hope that they might start up again.

  Hawke followed Abrehem’s gaze and said, ‘They vented it. They bloody vented it all.’

  Coyne turned towards Abrehem, willing him to deny what Hawke was saying. ‘No, that can’t be right? They wouldn’t do that.’

  Abrehen felt the last shred of his humanity unravelling from his soul and being replaced by a tightening coil of absolute rage. ‘Hawke’s right. They vented the atmosphere from this deck into the vacuum, that’s why the air tastes cold and hard. It’s only just been restored.’

  ‘Why would they do that? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘The breach in the plasma combustion chamber,’ sighed Abrehem, sitting at one of the many vacant tables. ‘Whatever caused it must have been worse than than we knew. Saiixek probably decided to blow the air out of this deck to vent the plasma into space and suffocate the fire.’

  ‘But he’s killed an entire shift of bondsmen,’ said Coyne, still unwilling to accept that such a monstrous act could have been deliberate.

  Abrehem surged to his feet and snatched Coyne by his oil-stained overalls.

  He slammed Coyne into the wall and shouted in his face: ‘When are you going to get it into your thick head, that the Mechanicus don’t care about our lives? We’re numbers, nothing more than that. So what if Saiixek had to kill a few thousand bondsmen just to put out a fire? There’s always another world where he can collar more slaves to work themselves to death for his bloody Machine-God.’

  ‘Easy there, Abe,’ said Hawke, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘Coyne here ain’t the enemy. It’s those Mechanicus bastards that need taking down a peg or two, yeah?’

  Abrehem felt his fury abate and he released Coyne with a shamefaced sob.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Coyne. ‘Forget about it.’

  ‘No,’ said Abrehem. ‘That’s the one thing I’m not going to do. The Adeptus Mechanicus murdered these bondsmen, and I’ll tell you this now. Someone’s going to pay.’

  The Speranza limped out of warp space ninety-three minutes later, its hull intact and its Geller fields at the limit of their capacity to endure. Magos Kryptaestrex had squeezed every last reserve of non-essential power to keep the shields intact long enough to reach the designated exit point calculated by Magos Azuramagelli. At Kotov’s insistence – and much to Azuramagelli’s chagrin – his trans-immaterial calculations were verified by Linya and Vitali Tychon, but both Quatrian magi confirmed his equations were without error.

  Far beyond the system edge of Valette, the Speranza broke the barrier between the empyrean and real space. The currents that had brought them this far through the warp were still turbulent, and the translation was not smooth. The Ark Mechanicus shuddered with translation burn, trailing ruptured screeds of immaterial energies that clung to its hull and howled madness at the crew within before vanishing in a haze of nebulous anger.

  With perimeter security established, the enormous ship’s port flank opened up; blast shields and airtight shutters ratcheting open as the surviving solar collector emerged like a slowly unfurling sail. Complex lattices of joints, gimbals, rotator cuffs and multiple hinges expanded in a precise geometric ballet until a kilometre-wide and seven-hundred-metre-long bank of energy-hungry cells was aimed towards the shimmering light of the far distant Valettian sun.

  So far from the system’s heart, the energy the collector would gather from the star would be l
ow, but the stream of hot neutrons flowing along the length of the electromagnetically charged hull and gathered by the Speranza’s ramscoops was the main target of this harvest. Almost as soon as the collector was fully deployed, the charge levels on the drained capacitor began to climb, and the speed of that ascent would only increase as the Speranza picked up speed.

  The emergency translation had scattered the fleet like seeds sown randomly by an agri-spreader, and another three hours passed before contact could be established with any other ship. One by one, the vessels of the fleet signalled their position, and began the slow process of regrouping. Refinery ships and genatorium vessels clustered close to the Speranza, monstrous umbilicals linking them to the Ark Mechanicus to suckle its mighty hunger for fuel and power. A dozen ships were emptied before the Speranza was sated enough to proceed.

  Moonchild and Wrathchild, twin souls as well as twin ships, were the luckiest of the fleet, scattered a day’s travel ahead of the Speranza. The Adytum remained tucked in close to the mighty vessel, and the Cardinal Boras lay abeam of the fleet, less than fifteen hours away. The escorts Mortis Voss and Blade of Voss were not so lucky, trailing at least a day behind in wilderness space.

  Despite repeated attempts to locate Honour Blade with long-range auspex, deep augur scans and astropathic scrying, no trace could be found of the third vessel launched from Voss Prime. The fleet searched for as long as Archmagos Kotov deemed appropriate, but every captain knew in his heart that to linger in the trackless gulfs between systems was too hazardous to risk for long.

  The mater-captains of the surviving Vossian craft demanded extra time to search for their lost sister ship, but Kotov overruled them and threatened to relieve both women of command if they disobeyed his orders to make best speed for the distant system edge. Reluctantly, Mortis Voss and Blade of Voss turned their prows for Valette and followed orders.