His forearms were sheathed in bronze, and instead of hands he possessed masses of dangling, twitching flail-like whips. They writhed like the tentacles of a squid, coated in blood that hissed and evaporated in the electrical heat.
The man’s head was encased in metal that was part helmet, part implanted skull plates. A circular Cog Mechanicus of blood-red iron was stamped into his forehead and the skin of his cheeks was tattooed with what looked like scripture. His teeth were bared in a rictus grin of slaughter, and he walked towards Abrehem with grim and purposeful steps. The electro-flails sparked and danced as they trailed on the metal deck.
Hands helped Abrehem upright, and though he had to bite his bottom lip to keep from screaming in agony, he was glad to see that one of those who helped him upright was Ismael. Hawke loitered behind his old overseer with a stupid grin plastered across his features.
The bloodstained slaughterman stopped in front of Abrehem and he felt the flicker of its fealty optic scanning his eyes. The iron-sheathed head leaned down towards him as though to sample his scent, and the thing’s lipless mouth parted. Corpse-breath sighed from between its polished steel fangs as it knelt before him with its head bowed.
‘Adeptus Mechanicus,’ rasped the warrior, the words dust-dry. ‘Locke, Abrehem. Pattern imprint accepted. Rasselas X-42 activation sequence completed. By your leave.’
Abrehem wanted to answer, but the pain from his ravaged arm was too great and he sagged into the arms of his followers as unconsciousness swallowed him.
Azuramagelli was doing his best to track the eldar warship, but Kotov knew that the auspex would have trouble locking on to such a vessel even in the calmest of spatial conditions. He reclined in the command throne, warming up the Speranza’s weapons systems and diverting power to the gunnery decks. Without shields, there was a concurrent increase in available resource to allocate to the guns, but without anything to plot firing solutions, they might as well shoot blindly into space and hope for the best.
‘Eldar ship is coming about, somewhere on our upper right quadrant,’ shouted Azuramagelli.
‘Guns unable to gain a positive fix,’ noted Blaylock.
‘Increasing engine output,’ said Saiixek. ‘We can’t fight this ship, not here.’
‘Change nothing,’ said Galatea, and Saiixek’s inloaded command was instantly canceled. ‘We navigate the Halo Scar as decreed or we do not survive.’
‘We will not survive if we allow the eldar free rein to blast us to pieces,’ stormed the engineering magos, venting an angry cloud of icy vapour.
Kotov ignored the bickering voices, knowing that Galatea was right. His mind was sinking deep into the rushing torrent of the ship’s machine-spirit, his grasp on his sense of self slipping with every passing moment.
‘Blaylock,’ he whispered, his binary fragmentary and fading. ‘Hold on to my biometrics.’
‘Archmagos?’ replied his Fabricatus Locum. ‘What do you intend?’
Kotov did not answer and released his hold on the shard of ego-consciousness that prevented the immense machine-spirit of the Speranza from dragging the last essence of his humanity down into its mechanical heart.
He plunged deep into the datasphere and was instantly engulfed by an ocean of light. The inner workings of the Speranza spiralled around Kotov in an impossibly complex lattice of fractal systems, heuristic algorithmatix and impossible weaves of information that defied any mortal understanding. Down in the ancient strata of the Speranza, Galatea’s touch was a dimly perceived irritant, a skimming connection that could be erased with the merest shrug.
Kotov’s fragile consciousness plunged deeper and deeper, the gossamer-thin lifeline held by Magos Blaylock a tremulous thread in a firestorm of golden light. He saw systems flicker past his floodstream that were as alien to him as anything the most secretive xenotech might dream of in his fevered nightmares, and technological echoes of machines that surely predated the Imperium itself.
Power generation that could harness the galactic background radiation to propel ships beyond lightspeed, weapon-tech that could crack open planets and event horizon machines that had the power to drag entire star systems into their light- and time-swallowing embrace.
All this and more dwelled here, ancient data, forgotten lore and locked vaults where the secrets of the ancients had been hidden. In this one, fleeting glance, Kotov realised he had been a fool to drag this proud starship into the howling emptiness of space in search of hidden secrets.
The Speranza was the greatest secret of all, and in its heart it held the truth of all things, the key to unlocking all that the Mechanicus had ever dreamed. Yet that knowledge was sealed behind impenetrable barriers, bound in the heart of the mighty vessel for good reason. The knowledge of the Men of Gold and their ancient ancestors was encoded in its very bones, enmeshed within every diamond helix of its structure.
Was that why its builders had abandoned its construction?
Did they fear what damage the generations to come might wreak with such knowledge?
They feared what I might become...
The words came fully formed in Kotov’s mind, wordless and without vocabulary, but a perfectly translated sentiment that existed only as pure data.
That is but the most recent of my names. I have had many in my long life. Akasha, Kaban, Beirurium, Veda, Grammaticus, Yggdrasil, Providentia... a thousand times a thousand more in all the long aeons I have existed.
Kotov knew he was not hearing words or anything that could be equated to language, simply the spirit at the heart of the Speranza adapting its essence in ways he could understand. He didn’t even know if the thing with which he conversed could be thought of as an individual entity. Was it perhaps something infinitely older and unimaginably larger than he could possibly comprehend; a galactic-wide essence given voice?
Dimly he recognised that these were not his thoughts, but those of the datasphere around him.
I know this, but even if this iron shell is destroyed, I will endure.
Your lives are meaningless to me. Why should I care, so long as I endure?
I represent nothing, I simply am.
Kotov knew he could not appeal to the vastness around him by any mortal means of measurement, nor could he hope to persuade it with threats, promises or material concerns. What did such pure machine intellect and perfect thought care for the lives of mortals when it had existed since the first men had stumbled across the principles of the lever?
He sensed the Machine-Spirit’s amusement at his desperation and silently willed it to rouse a portion of its incredible power.
Very well, I will help you.
The vast awareness at the heart of the Speranza rose up around him.
Kotov’s mote of consciousness was flung into the maelstrom of surging data and purpose, spun around and hurled into the cosmic vastness of the informational ocean, as insignificant and as meaningless as a speck of stellar dust against the impossible vastness of the universe.
Bielanna watched the light fade from the human’s eyes, her war-mask keeping her from feeling anything other than savage joy at his death. The bodies of the ship’s crew lay sprawled around her, broken and taken apart by the stalking wrath of the Scorpion Aspect Warriors. The flame-wreathed form of Kaela Mensha Khaine’s avatar turned and strode back through the webway portal that had brought them to the bridge of the human ship.
It understood there was no more death to be wrought here and with its departure, the brutal desire to ki
ll and main diminished. She still felt the touch of the Bloody-Handed God, and would continue to feel it until she allowed her war-mask to recede into the locked cell of her psyche where she kept it chained until it was needed.
It was already slipping from her mind and she let it bleed away.
Bielanna blinked, as though truly seeing her surroundings now.
The bridge of the human ship was an ugly place, made uglier by the arcing loops of blood on its iron walls and carelessly spilled in sticky pools. She felt the cold, closed-off arrogance of the humans that had sailed this ship, the legacy of death it had brought to those who had defied its masters, and she was not sorry it was soon to be destroyed.
The ship was breaking apart, its rudderless course carrying it into the deathly orbit of the neutron star that had taken the first human vessel. Bielanna knew she should rise and follow the avatar back to the Starblade, but the skein was becoming clearer now that her war-mask was fading.
She felt a presence next to her, and looked up at the blunt, razored edge of Tariquel’s presence.
‘We should go,’ he said. ‘This ship will be atoms in moments.’
‘I know,’ she replied, but did not move.
‘Why do you wait? The war leader of the Space Marines is slain and those few that skulk in its dark corners will soon be dead too.’
‘Because I need to be certain,’ said Bielanna, shutting out the blood-hungry anger of Tariquel’s war-mask. She placed her hand on the splintered chest of the Space Marine, the touch of his bloodstained armour distasteful to her, for it too carried a terrible legacy of slaughter and murder. She closed her eyes, letting the skein rise up around her in all its myriad complexity.
Its impossible weave enfolded her, but within the Halo Scar, where time and destiny were abstract notions that could be distorted, the monstrous deformation of this ancient relic of a billion year old war made a mockery of such concepts as certainty. The threads of the mortals that had died here were fragile things at best, hard to trace back even into the recent past, which was itself bent out of all recognisable shape.
She found the thread of the Space Marine, a frayed and bloody strand that unravelled all the way back to Dantium where she had first discerned the closest origin of those who were denying her the future she so craved. This warrior was their leader, the one who bound them to his purpose, and his death must surely unmake that purpose...
Yet as she cast his thread back into the skein, she saw with aching horror that the image of the laughing eldar children had grown even more distant and unattainable.
Far from restoring that potential future, this death had shunted it further into the realm of possible futures that were ever more unlikely to come to pass.
‘No!’ she sobbed, falling across the chest of the Space Marine as though mourning his passing.
Tariquel took hold of her arm and hauled her to her feet with enough force to leave a mark even through her armour.
‘It is time for us to go, farseer,’ he snarled.
His warrior’s touch brought her back to herself and in a moment of sickening clarity she saw he was right. The threads of the skein surged with power, and she saw the potential danger to the Starblade in a sudden and painful vision of explosions and splintering wraithbone.
With tears streaming down her angular cheeks, Bielanna followed the Striking Scorpions back through the webway portal.
An age or an instant passed, a span of deep time like an epoch of the galaxy or the fleeting life of a decaying atomic particle. Kotov felt a lurch of sickening vertigo, even through his machine body, as his consciousness returned to the forefront of his brain with a jolt of cerebral impact. His senses were pitifully small, stunted things that were barely adequate for basic existence, let alone conversant with the mysteries of...
Kotov struggled to remember where he had been and what he had seen, knowing on some desperately fundamental level that it was vital he not forget the things he had learned.
‘Archmagos?’ said a voice he knew he ought to recognise, but which was completely unknown to him. Nothing of his surroundings was familiar to him, but as the cloaked and hooded individual next to him laid a clawed, mechanical hand on his shoulder, that changed in an instant.
‘Archmagos?’ said Tarkis Blaylock, his augmitters conveying strain, concern and a measure of anticipation.
‘Yes,’ he managed eventually. ‘I am here.’
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ said Blaylock. ‘I thought you had been subsumed by the machine-spirit and were lost forever in the datasphere.’
‘No such luck, Tarkis,’ spat Kotov, then regretted it immediately.
Though he could remember almost nothing of what he had experienced in the unknown depths of the Speranza’s machine heart, he knew that without Blaylock’s lifeline to the organic world above, he would never have returned to the seat of his consciousness.
‘Apologies, Magos Blaylock,’ he said. ‘I am thankful for your aid in bringing me back.’
Blaylock nodded. ‘Were you successful?’
‘Successful?’ said Kotov. ‘I... I don’t know.’
‘Yes, he was,’ said Galatea, clattering over to stand before him on its awkwardly-constructed legs. ‘Can you not feel the great heart of the vessel responding?’
Kotov stared at the hybrid machine intelligence, and what had seemed only moments before to be a creature of immense sophistication and threat now seemed small and primitive, like a wheel-lock pistol next to a macro-cannon.
The command deck was still lit with numerous threat responders, damage indicators and cascading lists of chrono-gravometric alarms, but overlaying that was a subtle rain of information-rich light that permeated the existing data streams and soothed them with tailored algorithms of perfect code.
Systems Kotov had never known existed were activating all over the ship and those that had previously been rendered blind and useless by the fury of the Halo Scar returned to life as though they had never been afflicted. Looping targeting arrays for weapons he had never imagined the Speranza possessing and others that he did not understand flashed up before the astrogation and engineering hubs.
Azuramagelli and Saiixek backed away from their stations, confused and not a little frightened by this unknown power rising up around them. Stark against the red of the main display, the image of an alien starship resolved itself. It was smooth and graceful, its hull like a tapered gemstone and topped with a vast sail that billowed in the gravitational tempests. Its image flickered and danced as though attempting to conceal itself like a teasing courtesan, but whatever matrices were at work in the heart of the Speranza saw through its glamours with ease.
‘Return to your stations,’ ordered Blaylock, cycling through the information pouring into the command deck.
Saiixek nodded and Azuramagelli’s armature scuttled back to the astrogation hub, inloading the flood of resurgent information as a representation of the Explorator Fleet bled into the noosphere. It was a distorted representation, but at least it gave Kotov a snapshot of what assets he had left to him. He saw that many of his support ships were missing, and could only assume the rogue currents and riptides had dragged them off course and seen them pulled apart in the gravitational storms.
‘Report,’ said Kotov as informational icons flashed to life around the deck.
‘Wrathchild and Moonchild closing and assuming attack postures,’ said Azuramagelli.
‘Mortis Voss reports it has a firing solution for its torpedoes,’ added Saiixek.
Unable to keep the relish from his augmented voice, Kryptaestrex said, ‘Multiple firing solutions have presented themselves to me, archmagos. I am unable to ascertain their source or the nature of the weapon systems, but they all have a lock on the alien vessel.’
Kotov opened a stable vox-channel to every ship of war in his fleet.
‘All vessels open fire,’ he
said. ‘I want that ship destroyed.’
The flanks of the Speranza shuddered as a weapon system built into its superstructure ground upwards on heavy duty rails. A vast gun tube rose from the angled planes of the Ark Mechanicus like the great menhir of some tribal place of worship being lifted into place. Power readouts, the likes of which had rarely been seen in the Imperium since before the wars of Unity, bloomed within the weapon and a pair of circling tori described twisting arcs around the tapered end of the unveiled barrel.
Elements of the technology that had gone into their construction would have been familiar to some of the more esoteric branches of black hole research and relativistic temporal arcana, but their assembled complexity would have baffled even the Fabricator General on Mars. Pulsing streams of purple-hued anti-matter and graviton pumps combined in unknowable ways in the heart of a reactor that drew its power from the dark matter that lurked in the spaces between the stars. It was a gun designed to crack open the stately leviathans of ancient void war, a starship killer that delivered the ultimate coup de grace.
Without any command authority from the bridge of the Speranza, the weapon unleashed a silent pulse that covered the distance to the Starblade at the speed of light.
But even that wasn’t fast enough to catch a ship as nimble as one built by the bonesingers of Biel-Tan and guided by the prescient sight of a farseer. The pulse of dark energy coalesced a hundred kilometres off the vessel’s stern and a miniature black hole exploded into life, dragging in everything within its reach with howling force. Stellar matter, light and gravity were crushed as they were drawn in and destroyed, and even the Starblade’s speed and manoeuvrability weren’t enough to save it completely as the secondary effect of the weapon’s deadly energies brushed over its solar sail. Chrono-weaponry shifted its target a nanosecond into the past, by which time the subatomic reactions within every molecule had shifted microscopically and forced identical neutrons into the same quantum space.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 39
