As Turentek’s great feat of engineering was revealed, the warhorns of its brethren howled in welcome, drowning out the throngs of adepts, devotees and magi who had assisted in bringing the god-machine of Legio Sirius back from the brink of death.
Amarok and Vilka loped back and forth, the Warhounds beckoning to their restored pack-mate.
And Canis Ulfrica took a ponderous step from the fabricator cradle, the booming echo of its splay-clawed foot drawing forth yet more cries of adulation and welcome. Eryks Skálmöld walked his Reaver fully from its cradle, reborn and restored, the grey, blue and gold of its armour like new.
The wounds that the Moonsorrow had suffered were now fully repaired and a new blooding banner added to its oil-dripping carapace. The physical reminder of its humbling had been erased, but the mental repercussions were far from healed, and Skálmöld halted the Titan as he looked up into the wolf-mask of his packmaster’s engine.
Lupa Capitalina towered over the host, magisterial as it surveyed the thousands of Cult Mechanicus swarming at its feet. For the briefest instant, a sensor ghost flickered through the Warlord’s Manifold, too inconsequential to be noticed by anyone save a senior princeps, a skittering bio-echo of a long ago vanquished foe.
Canis Ulfrica’s snarling snout flinched, and its shoulders cranked as it too felt the echo through the Manifold. The Reaver and the Warlord met each other’s gaze, and a moment of silent communion passed between the singular minds encased within their amniotic tanks.
Canis Ulfrica lowered its head in a gesture of submission.
But only the Wintersun felt how grudgingly it was made.
Images scrolled through Magos Blaylock’s optical feeds, frozen moments of history captured for posterity and any potential future records of his life and deeds. Centuries of material was stored in his exo-memory coils and decades within his own skull-memes. His life had been one of achievement and dutiful service, and he had ensured a comprehensive record of the Kotov expedition for the undoubted inquiries to follow.
He had no personal agenda with Lexell Kotov, but knew that his own organisational abilities and powers of statistical analysis far outstripped those of the archmagos. To have lost three forge worlds was inexcusable, and with the resources of Kotov’s Martian forges at his disposal, Blaylock knew with a significant degree of statistical certainty that he could extend the power of the Adeptus Mechanicus into regions of space that had yet to fully develop their potential.
But those were ambitions for a later day.
First, this expedition needed to be discredited, and Blaylock believed he had found his first weapon.
The images he had blink-clicked while in the stateroom of Roboute Surcouf swam into focus, meaningless commendations in the armed services of Ultramar, Naval commissions and rank pins from various ships of the line. The images flickered past with a pulse of thought, captured images moving in rapid procession like a child’s flipbook animation.
At last he came to the image he sought, and what until now had only been a suspicion aroused by an anomalous data discrepancy in the Manifold record was moved up to a certainty as he zoomed in on the document hung behind the rogue trader’s desk.
The Letter of Marque bore Segmentum Pacificus accreditation, and the winged eagle of Bakkan sector command was a complex multi-dimensional hololith, with numerous deep layers of encryption that made it virtually impossible to convincingly counterfeit.
Virtually impossible, but not entirely impossible.
Blaylock’s floodstream swelled with what approximated pleasure for an adept of the Mechanicus.
Surcouf’s Letter of Marque was a fake.
The Black Templars bowed their heads in prayer, six grief-stricken warriors kneeling in one of the Speranza’s few temples dedicated exclusively to the glory of the Emperor. None of them wore armour, and each warrior’s bare back was scoured with the whips and hooked chains of self-mortification. Thick clots of sticky blood ran down each warrior’s flayed skin and Brother-Sergeant Tanna knew that such pain could never be enough to atone for their failure.
Their Reclusiarch was dead and not one of them had so much as lifted a blade in his defence.
The Black Templars were now warriors without a place to call their own, bereft of their spiritual leader and everything that connected them to their past and their duty. The Speranza was not their ship, and its inhabitants were not their people. The six of them were all that remained of the Scar Crusade, and Tanna found it almost impossible not to believe that they had been cursed since the death of Aelius at Dantium Gate.
The death of an Emperor’s Champion was a moment of unimaginable loss to the warriors of the Black Templars, and though Kul Gilad had claimed this crusade was neither penance nor punishment, it was hard not to think of it that way. Cut off from their fellow crusaders and trapped on the far side of the galaxy, they were as alone as it was possible to be.
Yet for all that, this was a chance to continue the work of the Great Crusade, a chance to bring the Emperor’s light to those that had never been blessed to know of its existence. He had tried to mitigate Kul Gilad’s loss with such sentiment, but the wound was too fresh and too raw for his warriors. No mere words of his could salve their broken pride and savaged honour.
Tanna cursed his limitations. He was a sergeant, a battle leader who knew how to follow orders and drive the men around him to complete them. But with no one to give those orders and no one to fill their hearts with fire and blood, what was left to them? Tanna was no great orator, no great innovator of tactics or philosophy.
He was a stalwart of the battle line, a redoubtable fighter and a reliable killer.
He was not a leader, and the warriors around him knew it.
For the first time since his elevation to the Fighting Companies, Tanna felt utterly alone.
Though he had fought and bled alongside these heroic warriors for the better part of two centuries, even Tanna knew an unbreakable bond of trust had turned to ashes between them. Varda claimed not to judge him for giving the order to launch the Barisan and fly the Thunderhawk through the gravitational storms towards the Speranza, but a subtle and steadily widening gap had opened between the two brothers.
And though Varda was a mere battle-brother, he was this Crusade’s Emperor’s Champion, and that gave him a seniority that no rank could afford to ignore.
Tanna rose from his prayers, his chest, shoulders and back gouged with self-inflicted wounds of shame. In one hand he carried a barbed chain and in the other his combat blade. Both were wet with his lifeblood. He turned to address his warriors, and their cold stares upon him were more painful than the flesh-scourges could ever hope to be.
‘Trust in the Emperor at the hour of battle,’ he said, falling back on ritual catechism.
‘Trust to Him to intercede, and protect His warriors as they deal death on alien soil.’
‘Turn these seas to red with the blood of their slain.’
Tanna broke with tradition as he spoke the last line of this battle-oath with his warriors.
‘Crush their hopes, their dreams. And turn their songs into cries of lamentation.’
Dramatis Personae
The Speranza
Lexell Kotov – Archmagos of the Kotov Explorator Fleet
Tarkis Blaylock – Fabricatus Locum, Magos of the Cebrenia Quadrangle
Vitali Tychon – Stellar Cartographer of the Quatria Orbital Galleries
Linya Tychon – Stellar Cartographer, daughter of Vitali Tychon
Azuramagelli – Magos of Astrogation
Kryptaestrex – Magos of Logistics
Turentek – Ark Fabricatus
Hirimau Dahan – Secutor/Guilder Suzerain
Saiixek – Master of Engines
Totha Mu-32 – Mechanicus Overseer
Abrehem Locke – Bondsman
Rasselas X-42 – Arco-flagell
ant
Vannen Coyne – Bondsman
Julius Hawke – Bondsman
Ismael de Roeven – Servitor
The Renard
Roboute Surcouf – Captain
Emil Nader – First Mate
Adara Siavash – Hired Gun
Ilanna Pavelka – Tech-Priest
Kayrn Sylkwood – Enginseer
Gideon Teivel – Astropath
Elior Roi – Navigator
Adeptus Astartes Black Templars
Tanna – Brother-Sergeant
Auiden – Apothecary
Issur – Initiate
Atticus Varda – Emperor’s Champion
Bracha – Initiate
Yael – Initiate
The Cadian 71st ‘The Hellhounds’
Ven Anders – Colonel of the Cadian Detached Formation
Blayne Hawkins – Captain, Blazer Company
Taybard Rae – Lieutenant, Blazer Company
Jahn Callins – Requisitional Support Officer, Blazer Company
Legio Sirius
Arlo Luth, ‘The Wintersun’ – Warlord Princeps, Lupa Capitalina
Marko Koskinen – Moderati
Joakim Baldur – Seconded Moderati
Magos Hyrdrith – Tech-Priest
Eryks Skálmöld, ‘The Moonsorrow’ – Reaver Princeps, Canis Ulfrica
Magos Ohtar – Tech-Priest
Gunnar Vintras, ‘The Skinwalker’ – Warhound Princeps, Amarok
Elias Härkin, ‘The Ironwoad’ – Warhound Princeps, Vilka
The Starblade
Bielanna Faerelle – Farseer of Biel-Tan
Ariganna – Striking Scorpion Exarch of Biel-Tan
Tariquel – Striking Scorpion of Biel-Tan
Vaynesh – Striking Scorpion of Biel-Tan
Uldanaish Ghostwalker – Wraithlord of Biel-Tan
001
Knowledge is power. They call that the first credo, but they are wrong. Knowledge is just the beginning. It is in the application of knowledge that power resides. After all, what is the value of discovery if we do not put what we learn into effect?
Millennia have come and gone since I became Mechanicus, but even as a novitiate caster of quantum runes, I was aware I had blindly accepted many principles unverified by my own experience as being true. Consequently, the conclusions I later based upon such principles were highly doubtful. From that moment of realisation I was convinced of the necessity of ridding myself of all the principles I had unquestioningly adopted.
I would build knowledge from my own self-discovered truths.
010
An ancient Terran order of techno-theologians once boasted heraldic devices emblazoned with the words Nullius in Verba, which even a basic proto-Gothic lexical servitor can tell you means Nothing upon Another’s Word. It is a credo I have lived by and by which I will die. The Venusian epistolarian who first scratched those words into cured animal hide was wise indeed, and the inheritors of the Red Planet would do well to recall his wisdom.
But the priests of Mars have lost sight of what it means to be Mechanicus.
The magi rejoice at scraps swept from the tables of gods and think themselves blessed. They bear such relics aloft like the greatest prizes, little realising that such intellectual flotsam and jetsam is worthless in the grand scheme of galactic endeavour.
They are idiot children stumbling around the workshop of a genius. The tools and knowledge they require to rebuild the glory of Mankind’s past is at their fingertips, yet they see it not. They wield lethally unpredictable technologies like playthings, heedless of the damage they wreak and ignorant that they are losing as much as they gain with every fumbling step.
So much that was lost has been rediscovered, they cry, but like a million scattered fragments of a puzzle, they are useless unless combined. With all that has been hidden beneath the sands of the Red Planet, we could rebuild the Imperium as it was in the halcyon days of the first great diaspora. We could achieve the dream upon which the Emperor was embarked in the fleeting moments of peace following the Pax Olympus.
Ah, how I wish I could have been there. To see the Omnissiah when He walked in the guise of flesh. To bathe in His light and feel the serenity of perfect code flowing through my body. One as mechanistically-evolved as I is not supposed to miss the soft, ever-degenerating meat-body I left behind in my ascension through the ranks of the Priesthood, but I would accept its infinite limitations just to have beheld that moment with organic eyes.
011
Now I see the world through organic silica membranes and glassine-meshed diamond. A thousand microscopic machines infiltrate the fluids that circulate within my new body of crystal and light. My limbs are powerful beyond even the strength of the Adeptus Astartes, my mind capable of ultra-fast calculations that allow cognition speeds far in advance of even the Fabricator General.
But nothing of such worth is ever achieved without sacrifice, and nothing is so fatal to the progress of Mankind as to suppose our grasp of technology is complete. To believe that there are no more mysteries in nature or that our triumphs are all won and there are no new worlds to conquer is to invite stagnation.
And stagnation is death.
I have travelled the void like few others before me.
I have crossed the barriers of time and space and seen further than any other. The elemental forces of the universe are mine to command. Time, space, gravity and light bend to my will.
Like the great celestial engineers of a far distant epoch, I carve the flesh of the galaxy to suit my desires. And where ancient war and forgotten genocides have wiped the slate clean, I have brought life and the promise of civilisation reborn.
The Mechanicus venerates those who draw closer to its vision of union with the God of all Machines, and they are right to do so.
But they have chosen the wrong deity.
By any mortal reckoning, I am a god.
So bold a statement could rightly be construed as arrogance.
In my case, it is modesty.
A simple statement of fact.
I am Archmagos Vettius Telok, and I am remaking what was lost.
Such is the power of my knowledge.
Barely worthy of being designated a planet, the doomed world hung in the fringes of Arcturus Ultra’s rapidly diminishing Kuiper belt at the farthest extent of the star system. Much of this spatial region was composed of frozen volatiles – drifting agglomerations of ice, ammonia and methane – and these were slowly being turned to vapour by the thermal death throes of the newly named star’s rapidly expanding corona. The Oort cloud had thinned to the point of vanishing altogether, allowing the vessels of the Kotov fleet to approach the system without fear of taking damage from the debris scattered like celestial litter at the system’s edge.
The dying planet had been christened Katen Venia, and its likely lifespan could be measured in months at best. It would soon be destroyed by the very star that had once nourished an unknown number of habitable worlds in that slender astronomical region named for a flaxen-haired thief of ancient myth.
The closest planets to the star had already been reduced to metallic vapour by its expanding heat corona and now only Katen Venia remained. Its outer layers of frozen nitrogen had almost entirely boiled off into space, exposing a surface of cratered ice and rock, soaring crystal growths of geometric beauty, abyssal canyons of sheared glaciers, and swathes of desolate tundra that had been ripped raw by the gravitational push and pull of its chaotic orbit.
Any currently uncontested method of celestial cartography would regard Katen Venia as an unremarkable world, a bare rock devoid of any notable features warranting attention. Only the study of its demise would be of any interest to most magi. Yet for all its apparent worthlessness, there was one aspect to Katen Venia that rendered it valuable beyond measure.
&
nbsp; Telok the Machine-touched, whose explorator fleet had been lost with all hands, had come this way. Numerous legends of Mars spoke of his foolhardy quest into the unknown to unearth an ancient technological marvel known as the Breath of the Gods. Each tale was embellished with its own twist to Telok’s obsession, but all agreed that his quest had come to a bad end.
But a newly-revealed relic of his doomed expedition had come to light, offering tantalising hints that the Lost Magos had actually found something in the unknown reaches beyond the light of familiar stars: a saviour pod beacon indicating that the newly-named Katen Venia was the final resting place of Telok’s flagship, the Tomioka.
It was this that had brought an Adeptus Mechanicus explorator fleet of such magnitude as had not been assembled for millennia to leave the confines of the Milky Way and establish orbit around the planet’s northern polar regions.
The heart of this fleet was a vessel that could be called unique without fear of contradiction. A mighty star-borne colossus. A relic of a time when the mysteries of technology were not shrouded in a veil of ignorance, and whose violent birth had destroyed a world. Its inhuman scale was the product of men who dared to build the greatest things their imaginations could conceive.
Its name was Speranza, and it was Ark Mechanicus; the flagship of Archmagos Lexell Kotov.
Unlike the battleships built in the Imperium’s fortified shipyards, the Ark Mechanicus had not been wrought with any martial aesthetic in mind, nor had it accrued centuries of encrusted ornamentation to glorify long-dead saints or heroes of war. It was a vessel that would never be called beautiful, even by those who had built it, for it had no symmetry, no clean lines nor even much of a straight axis that allowed for spurious notions of aerodynamics.
The Speranza was a vessel forever bound to the void, and only the positioning of its vast plasma engines’ containment-field generators allowed an observer to know which end was the prow and which the stern. Its outer hull was a tangled arrangement of intestinal duct-work, exposed skeletal superstructure, and ray-shielded crew spaces. Its graceless topside and its bulbous underside were ribbed plateaus overgrown with geometric accretions of unchecked industry. Refineries, ore-processing plants, gene-holds, test ranges, manufactories, laboratoria, power generators and assembly forges clung to its flanks in a haphazard arrangement that owed nothing to any design philosophies other than need and practicality. The Speranza was a vessel of exploration and research, a mariner of the nebulae whose sole task was to be part of Kotov’s Quest for Knowledge.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 41
