Archmagos Kotov,+ said a voice that cut into his mind with icy disdain. +Are you secure?+
‘I am,’ he replied, sending his words into the caustic tundra of the Sirius Manifold.
Then we are ready,+ said Princeps Arlo Luth.
‘Ready? Ready for what?’
To abandon this world.+
Watching Katen Venia’s last moments was a moment of great sadness for Roboute Surcouf. He had named this world and it was never easy to watch something beautiful die. Roboute remembered the girl whose name the planet shared, wondering if he would ever see her again and silently berated himself for so maudlin a thought.
Sickly bands of variegated light enveloped the planet in traceries of continent-wide lightning storms like a vast net cast around its splintering mass. The brightest point of light was centred on the northern pole, where the abortive expedition to the Tomioka had foundered. The evacuation of Katen Venia was over, with the majority of the embarked crew already back aboard the Speranza.
The Mechanicus had been forced to discard a great deal of materiel and resources in the flight from the surface, of which the Land Leviathans – Krakonoš, Adamastor and Fortis Maximus – were the most grievous loss. Much of their crew, adepts, tech-priests and menials alike, had chosen to remain with their machines rather than abandon them, and those men were almost certainly dead.
Roboute shook his head at their stupidity before remembering that, until recently, he had always believed that he would die aboard the Renard. He had survived his brush with death after the grav-sled had been winched to safety by the Tabularium’s docking clamp and a team of medicae had strapped an oxygen mask to his face. Adara was unhurt, as was Magos Pavelka, which – given the frantic nature of their excursion to the surface – was nothing short of a miracle.
The bridge of the Speranza was thronged with the senior members of the Kotov expedition; Mechanicus, Adeptus Astartes and Imperial Guard, drawn together to watch the final moments of Katen Venia and the loss of everything they had crossed the galaxy to discover. Azuramagelli was once again ensconced by the navigation arrays, with Kryptaestrex plugged in next to him. Vitali Tychon kept close to his daughter, a protective arm around her shoulder. From the bruises on her face, it seemed the excursions into the Tomioka had been as plagued by trouble as events outside.
Galatea stood in the centre of the command bridge, its low-slung palanquin connected to the Speranza in ways Roboute couldn’t begin to imagine. Pavelka had given him a rough idea of the heretical reality of Galatea, and the concept of a thinking machine gave Roboute cold chills whenever he thought of the onward implications.
Archmagos Kotov himself sat upon his command throne, looking like an exhausted king at the end of his reign and surrounded by courtiers just waiting for him to die. Hard on the heels of that thought, Roboute’s gaze shifted to Tarkis Blaylock, who stood at Kotov’s shoulder like a plotting vizier. He had no reason to suspect Blaylock of any such ambitions, but the image – once imagined – was hard to shake.
Roboute himself reclined in the noospheric-enabling chair he had occupied the last time he had come to the bridge, connected to the ship’s vast datasphere by inload sockets in the back of his neck. The vast majority of what this enabled him to see was meaningless lingua-technis or binaric cant, but he knew enough to know that no one gathered here really understood what they were seeing.
‘Are we far enough away from the planet?’ asked Roboute, trying to make sense of the energy emissions streaming from a port-side data hub.
Azuramagelli rotated a brain case to face him, though the disembodied slice of cerebral cortex had no outwardly obvious sensory apparatus to render such motion necessary. ‘The surveyor arrays are registering a build-up of energies beyond anything we have ever seen before. There is no way to tell what minimum safe distance would be required.’
‘So we might be in danger right now?’
‘Very likely,’ agreed Kryptaestrex, his thick robotic body disconnecting from the navigation stations and rumbling over to the motive power linkages and plugging in. ‘Saiixek began preparations for breaking orbit upon receipt of Magos Blaylock’s orders, but the engines will not be manoeuvre-ready for another six hours.’
‘I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with recent events,’ snapped Roboute, ‘but we’ll be lucky if that planet lasts another six minutes.’
Kryptaestrex bore Roboute’s outburst stoically and said, ‘There is little that can be done save to alter our aspect to the planet to reduce blast damage in the event of an explosive energy outburst.’
‘Explosive?’ asked Roboute, twisting in his seat to look up at Kotov. ‘Is that what we’re looking at? Is that planet going to blow up?’
Kotov waved a dismissive hand. ‘Magos Kryptaestrex should know better than to voice such evocative terms,’ he said. ‘Planets do not blow up, they fracture along established fault-lines, implode on their collapsing core or they simply become geologically inert. In all my centuries with the Mechanicus, I have never yet seen a planet explode.’
‘After everything we’ve seen on this expedition, that’s not exactly filling me with confidence.’
Kotov ignored him, and Roboute turned his attention back to the death throes of Katen Venia.
Clearly something was happening to the planet, something that was just as clearly almost complete. The fact that no one aboard the Speranza was admitting they had absolutely no idea what that might be was the white grox in the room.
The energy that had travelled from a vastly distant source to reach Katen Venia with virtually no degradation in field strength had begun a chain-reaction throughout the planet and, even now, Blaylock and Vitali were attempting to determine what had sent it.
‘Archmagos,’ said Azuramagelli, withdrawing all but his most basic connections to the navigation array. ‘Something’s amiss.’
The vagueness of Azuramagelli’s comment was so unlike anything an adept of the Cult Mechanicus might say that every eye in the bridge turned towards him.
‘Clarify, Azuramagelli,’ said Magos Blaylock with a clipped flush of admonitory binary.
‘I cannot,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘What I am seeing has no empirical precedent.’
Roboute skimmed the surface of the Speranza’s data inloads and was forced to agree with the Master of Navigation. What he was seeing made no sense. Every single external augur capable of receiving input from the planet below had either completely flatlined or registered an onrushing tide of impossible readings that were completely beyond measure.
The sudden influx of anomalous readings acted like a gout of raw promethium into an engine cowling, as space beyond the Speranza was abruptly filled with vastly contradictory states of being.
The Ark Mechanicus was simultaneously bombarded with exotic cosmic radiation of such complexity that it defied easy categorisation, while in the same moment finding itself adrift in space utterly bereft of a single electromagnetic transition. Such physical states of being were utterly at odds with one another and impossible in the same region of space at the same instant.
The Speranza resolved this paradox by blowing out numerous data hubs and surveyor stations in blurts of distressed binaric cant. A dozen servitors suffered instantaneous brain death and slumped to the deck with oil-infused blood squirting from their cranial implants.
‘The instant of creation and the time of heat death,’ said Vitali, rushing over to one of the few remaining surveyor stations and plugging himself in with haptic implants in his rapidly splitting fingertips.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Roboute, seeing that – with the exception of Vitali – every single magos had removed himself from any connection to the ship’s augurs. The illuminated streams pulsing between data prisms vanished as the libraries-worth of information was cut off in a single stroke.
‘Vitali?’ asked Roboute, disconnecting from the Speranza’s net
work and rising from his seat at the foot of Kotov’s throne. ‘What’s going on? I don’t understand what’s happening.’
‘I think it is fair to say that we are all adrift here, captain,’ replied Vitali. ‘But what I believe we are seeing is a state of universal birth and death played out in the same moment. This could very well be an ultra-compressed rendition of every single moment of time since the creation of the universe to its eventual end, when its endless transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and hence into heat have finally run down like a clock and stopped forever.’
Roboute didn’t understand more than a fraction of what Vitali had just said, but caught the apocalyptic gist of it easily enough. He looked up at Kotov, who had half-risen from his throne, his expression that of a man who had discovered his heart’s desire only to find it was a poison chalice.
‘Telok actually did it,’ said Kotov. ‘You were right, Tarkis. He actually got it to work.’
‘So it would seem,’ answered Blaylock. ‘And it appears we have blundered straight into his laboratory, mid-experiment.’
Roboute turned back to Vitali, looking up at the one aspect of the ship’s datasphere still available now that he was no longer plugged in via his spinal implants.
The hauntingly beautiful image of Katen Venia’s death.
‘This is the Breath of the Gods,’ said Roboute. ‘Imperator, we’re right in the middle of it all…’
The reticulated net of light surrounding Katen Venia pulsed with one last exhalation.
And exploded outwards in an onrushing tidal wave of photons and exotic particles that had not been seen in such concentrations for nearly fourteen billion years.
Only afterwards would any coherent picture of events surrounding the destruction of Katen Venia emerge, and even that proved to be fragmentary, contradictory and almost unbelievable.
Moments before the rapidly expanding energy shockwave exploded outwards from the doomed world, every square metre of ray shielding and every functional void pylon ignited across the Speranza. Every ship of the Kotov fleet found its shields flare into life and its external augurs shut down at the same moment, each captain at a loss as to the source of the initiating command.
The surging explosion of high energy flux, huge particle densities and pressures slammed past the Kotov fleet, scattering its ships like a spiteful warp fluctuation. Saiixek’s work to re-orientate the Speranza did much to mitigate the damage of the blast wave; the sheer mass of the Ark Mechanicus allowed it to ride out the worst of the explosion’s force. The very proximity of the fleet to Katen Venia isolated it within the eye of an outward-rushing bow wave of exotic particles, compressed gravity waves and unknowable forces.
Almost as soon as the blast wave passed over the fleet, a phase transition occurred, causing an exponential expansion of remodelled space-time. Passive auspex on the external surfaces of the Speranza registered an ultra-rapid spike in temperature caused by the high-energy photon density. Particle/antiparticle pairs of all descriptions were being instantaneously created and destroyed in violent collisions of sub-atomic matter – and only one other instant in history had achieved such a violent moment of creation.
But this was no creation of a universe, this was that force harnessed by incomparably ancient technology and bent to another purpose altogether.
Alone and isolated, the ships of the Kotov fleet battened down the hatches and rode out the storm of unleashed energies, fighting to hold their position in a ferocious upheaval of system-wide gravitational fluxions that could tear them apart in a heartbeat. Compared to the forces of matter transition being wielded in the Arcturus Ultra system, the titanic power of the Halo Scar paled in comparison. Tossed and swatted through space like leaves in a storm and not knowing if any of the other vessels were still alive, each captain fought to keep their ship intact until the fury of this stellar event was spent.
It took a further seven hours before the raging swells of high-energy particles and hyper-charged gravitational wavefronts had dissipated enough for any of the fleet vessels to risk deploying surveyor arrays. Travelling at near light-speed, whatever had exploded from Katen Venia would certainly have reached the star at the heart of the system by now. Having weathered the storm better than most, the Speranza was first to tentatively probe the void in an attempt to learn what had just happened.
Via a series of buffered servitor-proxies, Magos Azuramagelli eased the Ark Mechanicus’s senses out into space, sampling the local spatial volume for extreme thermoclines and harmful radiations. Given the existing chaotic nature of the dying system and the violence of the eruption from Katen Venia, he expected to find space lousy with squalling particle storms, volatile neutron flow and a background hash of electromagnetic noise that would render much of surrounding space virtually impenetrable to auspex.
What he found was far stranger, far more unexpected, and utterly unbelievable.
Arcturus Ultra was no longer a dying red giant, a bloated destroyer in its last incarnation before its explosive death as a supernova.
Now it burned as a life-sustaining main sequence star.
Glittering bands of metallic debris, rubble and coalescing gases surrounded the newly rejuvenated sun, the building blocks of planets. Gravity and time would do the rest of the work, and though millions of years might pass before worlds capable of sustaining life could form, such spans were the blink of an eye to a galaxy.
Katen Venia had gone, destroyed in the very act of creation it had propagated.
Only one impossible, yet inescapable conclusion presented itself.
The shock wave of unimaginably vast energies had been the corollary to an immensely powerful stellar engineering event centred upon the Tomioka. The sensory-occluding fields of stellar debris and radiation ejected from the dying star that had hidden what lay beyond the system was gone as though it had never existed, and Azuramagelli’s surveyors registered the presence of numerous systems with glowing stars of just the right mass and heat for sustaining life.
All arranged in a celestial alignment that was too perfect and too geometric to be accidental.
At the centre of this lattice of stars, the location Vitali Tychon’s cartographae had identified as the source of the initiating burst of energy, was a world broadcasting powerful isotope readings, energy signatures and Manifold-traffic that were instantly recognisable to every adept on the Speranza.
Adeptus Mechanicus.
What had once been effortless for her, as easy as stepping from one room to the next, now took an effort of will and mantras of focus she had not needed since her first, halting steps on this path. Bielanna’s mind felt caged, hemmed in by the layers of armour plating and hard angles inimical to the curvature of space-time pressing in around her. Her spirit was unable to take flight with the ease it had once taken for granted. The skein was tantalisingly within her grasp, its secrets at her fingertips, if only she could rise from her body. Invisible fetters hung upon her spirit, chaining it to the prison of skin, blood and bone. Was this a sign of her abilities failing or simply a side-effect of the hurt she had suffered in the last moments of the battle against the foolish humans?
She wanted to blame this terrible place of iron and oil they were forced to occupy after the Starblade had finally succumbed to the mortal wound the human’s chronometric weapon had inflicted. The Starblade’s shipmaster and his crew had remained aboard the graceful vessel as it was finally torn apart by the gravitational storms within the Halo Scar. They had died alone, their spirit stones lost and the light and beauty they had brought to the universe extinguished forever.
Bielanna felt their loss keenly, but shut herself off from the all-consuming grief, knowing it would only hinder her ascent into the skein.
A handful of the Starblade’s warriors had escaped with Bielanna through a hastily-crafted webway portal; they had all felt the nightmarish force of what the mon-keigh had unw
ittingly released on the outermost planet of the star system.
But only Bielanna truly understood the utterly alien nature of it.
That so cosmically powerful an event had not appeared in any version of the myriad entangled potential futures scared Bielanna more than she thought possible. An entire star system had been transformed, renewed and regenerated in a matter of hours. Such power was not meant for the galaxy’s current inheritors. Even the eldar in the days before the Fall, when their civilisation had spanned the galaxy and their arrogance had known no bounds, would not have dared meddle with such awesomely powerful forces.
Such arrogance was entirely human.
She had followed the threads of these humans in order to cut them and restore her future of motherhood, but the greater threat of this new power demanded precedence. Past, present and future were on a collision course, pulling together into a convoluted knot that would tear the fabric of space-time apart as the universe attempted to undo this violation of its natural order.
Taking a series of calming breaths, Bielanna fell back on the gentle gifts of Farseer Tothaire, recalling his meditative exercises that unbound spirit from flesh and material attachments from spiritual awakening. She let out a soft sigh as her spirit slipped its moorings and lifted into the outermost edges of the skein, letting its familiar mosaic of pasts and futures wash over her and renew her with its liminal beauty. It had no geography, save that which she imposed upon it, though its fluid, structureless immensity was only fleetingly visible through the many barriers that separated her from its depths.
Bielanna sought something familiar in the web of possibility that surrounded her, threads she could cling to and follow, pathways to lead her into the oceanic vastness of the skein. The golden threads of her assembled warriors surrounded her, but each time she tried to follow their paths into the future, they skittered away like a pack of startled Warp Spiders.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 57
