Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  The great bell in the High Temple to the Omnissiah of each remaining vessel was rung three times; once for the lost Honour Blade, once for the Machine-God’s lost children, and once for the mortal souls aboard her.

  The fleet moved on, scattered and stretched beyond what any Navy doctrinal treatise on convoy tactics would consider prudent, but at least together and closing formation. With Moonchild and Wrathchild leading the way, the Kotov Fleet plotted an intercept course with the lonely outpost that that traced a two hundred and thirty-five year orbit of the star at the heart of the system.

  The Valette Mechanicus Manifold station.

  The last point of contact with the lost fleet of Magos Telok.

  The Soulless sentience is the enemy of all life.

  The atmosphere of the pack-meet was as frosty as the misty air gusting from the coolant units, and it wasn’t about to get any better, thought Moderati Koskinen. Skálmöld had been spoiling for a fight ever since the incident. Koskinen respected Skálmöld, but he didn’t really like him, though he couldn’t blame him for his anger.

  In the two weeks since Lupa Capitalina attacked Canis Ulfrica, the prow forges of the Ark Mechanicus had worked continuous shifts to craft fresh weaponry and armour plates to replace the Reaver’s destroyed components. A veritable army of tech-priests, Legio acolytes and construction engines laboured on the fallen Titan, returning it to operational readiness. Such a monumental task would normally take months of intensive labour, ritual and consecration, but the Ark Fabricatus, a vast construction-engine magos named Turentek, had worked miracles in drastically shortening that time. The engine and its rebuilt parts would soon rise from the construction cradles, reborn and restored, but Koskinen knew it wasn’t the physical damage that was the worst thing to come out of the attack.

  He stood beside Princeps Luth’s casket, pressing a palm to the panes of armourglas and feeling the slumbering heartbeat of the divine being within. Magos Hyrdrith attended the monitoring device attached to the base of Luth’s casket, and the winking status lights along its base attested to the renewed health of the princeps.

  Luth was yet to be roused from his neurological dormancy, and who knew what state of mind the princeps would be in when he was awoken? Did he remember what happened on the training deck or would he still be fighting the desperate battle at Sulphur Canyon? Not even the senior Legio Biologis could say for sure what effect his actions would have on his mind. Koskinen willed Luth to be sane, for there was only one warrior who would take command of the Legio if the Alpha Princeps was judged unfit for duty.

  Skálmöld’s casket sat opposite Luth’s, plugged in a recessed bay of the medicae templum given over to the Legio by Archmagos Kotov. The Reaver princeps was a shadowed figure that hung like a limbless revenant in milky-white suspension. His casket was slightly smaller and more ornate than Luth’s, owing to its design being commissioned under the rubric of a different Fabricator.

  Magos Ohtar attended to his princeps with great diligence, for Skálmöld had suffered greatly too. His Titan had been damn near killed, and the feedback pain must have been unbearable. Like Lupa Capitalina, Canis Ulfrica had also lost a moderati. Tobias Osara had been vaporised in the blast that had taken the Reaver’s arm, and its second moderati, Joakim Baldur, had been badly wounded. His right arm and a portion of his skull were encased in dermal-wrap and his burned skin replaced with vat-cultured grafts. Baldur glared at Koskinen as though he was personally responsible for the bad blood between their Titans. Koskinen didn’t rise to the bait, and held his tongue while they awaited the arrival of the Skinwalker.

  Cold air filled the medicae templum, and Koskinen pulled his uniform jacket tighter about himself, wishing he’d thought to wear his heavier robes. The temperature within was precisely controlled, and a thin patina of frost coated the metallic icons of the Omnissiah on the walls, the insulated machinery of the central cogitator and the porcelain-tiled floor. Sterile steel plating encased the lower half of the walls, and a complex network of ribbed pipework hung from the ceiling, venting occasional gusts of ammoniac steam. Hundreds of glassek cylinders, each large enough to contain a human being, lined the upper reaches of the roof space, suspended on mechanised arms that could rotate them to the floor. Koskinen remembered floating in one of these fluid-filled tanks after the battle with the tyranids on Beta Fortanis, purging his floodstream of discarded data and Manifold junk.

  It was not a pleasant memory, for such purges were not painless procedures.

  Pacing the length of the medicae templum was Elias Härkin, whose pathogenically-ravaged frame was completely encased in a latticework exoskeleton of brass and silver. His shaven skull was red and black with a complete covering of woad-markings; jagged wolf-tails, bloodied fangs and slitted eyes in the darkness. Atrophied facial muscles twitched as the electrode stimulators that compensated for his cerebrovascular impairment and allowed him to speak fired a series of test signals. Like most princeps, Härkin loathed being removed from Vilka, and his artificially-motivated body moved with a stilted, hunched-over gait, not unlike the Warhound he piloted.

  As a princeps he was a god, as a mortal he was cripple.

  The pressurised door slid open, and the Skinwalker entered. The youngest princeps of Legio Sirius, Gunnar Vintras wore his silver hair shaven tight to the skull and his dress uniform was crisp and pressed as though about to attend a Legio function. A curved power sabre on a platinum chain hung at his hip, and he carried a gold-chased bolt pistol in a thigh holster.

  ‘Nice of you to show up,’ said Härkin, his dysarthria rendered intelligible by the fibre-bundle muscles, though still distorted.

  ‘Nice to see you too, Elias,’ said Vintras, taking a seat at the central cogitator bank. ‘When the Moonsorrow calls a pack-meet, I come running.’

  ‘The meet began thirty minutes ago,’ said Härkin.

  Vintras shrugged and sprang from his seat as though already bored with sitting down.

  ‘It takes time to dress this well,’ he said, straightening his uniform jacket and brushing an invisible speck of dust from his shoulder epaulettes. ‘Of course, you have your cyber-grooms dress you, don’t you? They do the best with what they have, I’m sure.’

  ‘Princeps Luth isn’t dead, you know?’ said Koskinen, angered by Vintras’s posturing.

  Vintras circled the cogitators to stand before him, and Koskinen wished he hadn’t spoken. To be a moderati aboard a Warlord Titan was a position of great honour, but any princeps – even a Warhound princeps – outranked him and had the power to end his life.

  ‘What’s this, a moderati getting above his station?’ said Vintras, leaning over Koskinen and baring teeth filed to sharpened fangs. ‘Careful, little man, before this big bad wolf tears out your throat.’

  Leave the boy alone, Vintras,+ said a sharp-toothed voice from the augmitter mounted on Skálmöld’s casket. +He sees that you come to a pack-meet dressed for a funeral.+

  ‘Apologies, Moonsorrow,’ said Vintras, backing off with a feral grin. ‘I await your word.’

  ‘Right, we’re all here now, Skálmöld,’ grunted Härkin, his exoskeleton wheezing and clicking as he resumed his pacing. ‘What is it you want from us?’

  You know what I want. Command. Luth is a spent force. His time is over. Mine is upon the Legio. You all know this.+

  No one answered the Moonsorrow. Koskinen and Hyrdrith had expected this, but to hear it said out loud, so boldly before the rest of the Legio, was still a shock. Looking around the medicae-templum, Koskinen realised that no one wanted Skálmöld in command. The pack dynamic was a reflection of the alpha, and Skálmöld’s cold heart would eventually come to dominate the engines under his command and turn them from co-operative hunters to vicious predators. Härkin looked appalled at Skálmöld’s presumption, and even Vintras looked uneasy at this development, though he must surely have seen it coming.

  ‘Princeps Luth has
yet to wake,’ said Härkin.

  And when he does, can anyone here say he will not dream of old wars and turn his guns on a pack brother once more?+

  Koskinen wanted to speak in Luth’s defence, but the Magos Biologis had found no cause for his waking nightmare and could offer no guarantees that such a psychotic break would not happen again. Skálmöld spoke nothing but the truth, but it still rankled Koskinen’s sense of justice that the Reaver princeps was wresting pack leadership while the alpha could not defend his position.

  ‘Command authority has to be granted by the Oldbloods,’ said Princeps Härkin, in a last-ditch attempt to invoke Legio protocol.

  The Oldbloods are not here. We are. I am. The Wintersun turned his guns on a brother warrior. There is no greater crime against the pack. Why do you even argue, Ironwoad? I am the Moonsorrow and you are not my equal.+

  Härkin bowed in a clatter of exo-joints. ‘You are senior pack, Moonsorrow.’

  Then the matter is done with,+ said Skálmöld. +I am Alpha Princeps.+

  No.+

  Koskinen jumped at the sound issuing from the casket beside him. Princeps Arlo Luth floated to the glass, his bulbous, elongated skull still raw from the numerous invasive surgeries he had recently undergone. The cables that connected him to the Manifold were absent, and the threaded sockets in his chest and spine gaped like steel-edged wounds. Green lights flickered at the front of the casket, and Koskinen saw Hyrdrith withdraw a surreptitious data-plug.

  I am the Wintersun, and you are not my equal.+

  The Valette Manifold station hung in the darkness of the system’s edge like a patient arachnid waiting for unwary prey to become trapped in its web. Its bulbous central section was dark and glossy with ice, and numerous slender limbs extended from its gently rotating central hub; manipulator arms, auspex, surveyor equipment, monitoring augurs and psi-conduits. Though still hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, the Speranza’s prow-mounted pict-feeds brought its image into perfect focus.

  A reverent hush held sway on the Speranza’s command deck. As the last place to have received word from Magos Telok, the Valette Manifold station was a holy place and memorial all in one. None of the gathered magi failed to recognise the significance in coming here before attempting to breach the Halo Scar.

  Magos Azuramagelli maintained their course and monitored the gradual increase in engine power as work continued to repair the damaged plasma combustion chamber. The loss of so many of Saiixek’s bondsmen had proved inconvenient, but with the addition of numerous work gangs of servitors from the drained refinery vessels, the expected dip in productivity and efficiency was proving to be less than the magos of engineering had feared. At the farthest edge of the deck, Linya Tychon and her father worked at an astrogation hub, manipulating a pair of four-dimensional maps.

  Magos Blaylock kept station beside the command throne, processing the ship’s inputs and allowing Kotov to maintain communion with the Speranza. The Ark Mechanicus was still skittish after the incident with the Titans, and required a light touch to keep its systems appeased. Much of Kotov’s cognitive power was directed in healing the spiritual wounds done to the starship and regaining its unequivocal trust. Much of the situational knowledge stream he would process at a subconscious level, he was forced to delegate to his subordinates and learn second-hand.

  ‘Any response to our binary hails yet?’ asked Kotov.

  ‘No, archmagos,’ replied Blaylock, sifting through the accumulated data inloading from their scans of the darkened station. ‘We continue to be rebuffed.’

  ‘And its Manifold still won’t accept communion?’

  ‘It will not,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘It is most perplexing.’

  Kotov took a moment to study the distant station, its mass a deeper dark against the prismatic stain of the Halo Scar beyond the corona of the system sun’s light. He had studied the anomaly at the edge of the galaxy extensively, but to actually see it for the first time gave him a strange frisson of excitement and fear.

  Emotions Kotov had thought long since consigned to his organic past.

  The Tychons were collecting reams of data on the ugly phenomenon to better gauge a path through the gravitational tempests raging within its nebulous boundary. Their work was highly detailed, but the thousands of years of accumulated immatereology statistics within the Manifold station would greatly aid their cartographic equations. So far they had received nothing but static in response to their repeated attempts to persuade the station to exload its data to the Speranza.

  Yet as fascinating as the Halo Scar’s deformation of space-time was, Kotov kept finding his gaze drawn back to the Manifold station. Six hundred metres wide at its central bulge, and three hundred metres high, the station was a mote in the galactic wilderness, almost invisible in the darkness. Only faint starlight glinting from the ice on its hull provided an outline. Glittering drifts of reflective chips hung around the station like frozen snowflakes, but the source of these tiny pieces of orbital debris was a mystery.

  And Kotov abhorred mysteries to which he knew he would find no answer.

  Ghostly and dead, the station held true to its ancient orbit, a prisoner of gravity and physics.

  Kotov’s myriad senses, more than any unaugmented mortal could hope to understand or employ, were alert for any sign that there was anything or anyone alive on the Valette station. So far they had not given him any hope that he would find any of the designated crew alive aboard the station.

  Yet for all that, Kotov was certain that there was something on that station that was looking back at them, watching them, studying them...

  ‘Time to intercept?’ he said, throwing off the ridiculously organic notion of being observed.

  ‘Three hours, fifteen minutes, archmagos,’ replied Azuramagelli, shifting his exo-body across the bridge to a second astrogation hub. Spindle-like manipulator arms extruded from the underside of his exo-armature body and drew out a physical keyboard.

  ‘A problem, Azuramagelli?’

  Two of Azuramagelli’s brain jars swivelled in their mounts as he answered.

  ‘Unknown,’ replied Azuramagelli. ‘Ever since we dropped out of the warp, the rear auspexes have been picking up an intermittent contact. Nothing I can fix upon, but it is curious.’

  ‘What do you believe it to be? Another ship?’

  ‘Most likely it is residual warp interference or a side-effect of our recent troubles,’ said Azuramagelli, his manipulator arms fine-tuning the hazy auspex image before him. ‘But, yes,I suppose it could be a ship.’

  ‘Might it be the Honour Blade?’

  ‘I do not believe so, though the presence of the Halo Scar on the far edge of the system is making accurate readings difficult. Perhaps with access to the primary astrogation hub I might obtain a clearer answer for you, archmagos.’

  Kotov ignored the jibe at the Tychons and said, ‘Keep watch on your ghost readings and inform me of any developments.’

  Azuramagelli’s brain jars turned away, and Kotov heard the armoured gate to the command deck slide down into the polished floor. He read the biometrics of Roboute Surcouf, and swivelled his command throne to face the rogue trader.

  The man had answered Kotov’s summons in a loose Naval storm coat, grey in colour, with discolouration where rank patches had been torn off. Dark trousers were tucked into knee-high brown boots, and in deference to his hosts and skitarii escort, he had left his thigh holster empty. Surcouf strolled onto the upper tier and took a moment to look around, his gaze lingering a fraction of a second longer on Mistress Tychon than any other aspect of the command deck.

  Elevated heart rate, pupillary dilation, increased hormonal response.

  Surely the captain did not harbour amorous thoughts towards a member of the Cult Mechanicus? The idea was ludicrous.

  Kotov dismissed the man’s foolishness and said, ‘Welcome to the command deck
, captain. Thank you for attending upon me.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Surcouf. ‘I’ll admit, I was looking forward to seeing the bridge of this ship of yours. Pavelka and Sylkwood wanted to come with me, but they’re busy helping Magos Saiixek down in the engineering decks just now.’

  ‘And what do you make of my command deck?’ inquired Kotov. ‘It is quite something, is it not?’

  ‘I have to admit, it’s a little underwhelming,’ said Surcouf at last.

  Kotov felt the rumble of the slighted ship within him, but quelled it as understanding dawned.

  How easy it was to forget the limitations of mortals!

  ‘Of course,’ said Kotov. ‘You are not noospherically enabled.’

  ‘Not unless I’m plugged in.’

  ‘I took it for granted that you could see as I see.’

  ‘Never take anything for granted,’ said Surcouf. ‘That’s when you start making mistakes.’

  Irritated at being lectured to by a lesser mortal, Kotov made a complex haptic gesture, and a contoured bucket seat emerged from an irising deck plate beside the rogue trader. Surcouf swept aside the tails of his long coat and sat down, unspooling a thin length of insulated cable from the concave headrest. Taking a moment to find the socket under his hair at the nape of his neck, Surcouf slotted home the connector rods and engaged the communion clamp. His body twitched with the system shock of sudden inload, but he relaxed with the quick ease of an experienced spacefarer.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now I see. Yes, very impressive, archmagos.’

  ‘We are almost at the Halo Scar,’ said Kotov. ‘Are you still confident you can guide us on the other side?’

  ‘I have the data wafer with the astrogation data, don’t I?’

  ‘So you claim, but I have yet to see anything further on its veracity.’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to trust me,’ said Surcouf, nodding towards the main cascade display. ‘Is that the Manifold station?’