‘What manner of creator breathes life into a being and then abandons it?’ demanded Galatea. ‘Even the vengeful god of Old Earth took an interest in his handiwork.’
‘Not all creators are benevolent,’ said Kotov. ‘And not all creations turn out the way their creator intended. Mechanicus experimental logs and myth cycles are replete with tales of such ill-conceived mistakes being destroyed by their creators in disgust.’
‘Just as many warn of their creations being the destroyers.’
‘And if you do kill Telok? What then?’
‘Then we will take the Breath of the Gods for ourselves,’ said Galatea. ‘And the galaxy will learn exactly what a machine intelligence is capable of doing.’
Icy winds swept down the flanks of the black and silver mountain, as cold as he remembered them the last time he had climbed the shingled path from the frozen river to the Oldblood fortress. The snow was knee deep and fresh, just as he remembered, clinging to his doeskin trousers and soaking through to the flesh of his legs. Howling winds whipped the powdered snow from the ground, lashing his face raw and keeping the vast bulk of the mountain from his sight.
Arlo Luth pressed on into the blizzard, pulling his bearskin cloak tighter. He wasn’t built for this kind of weather; too long and lean and without any fat to his spare frame. The cold stabbed through him, freezing the marrow in his bones and sucking the last warmth from his body.
It had been three hundred years since he had last followed this path, three long centuries of war that had seen him transformed utterly from the slender-boned youngster that had first made the climb to the lair of the Canidae. He thought back to the callow boy he had been, whose only thoughts had been hunting, reaving and wenching.
All that had come to an end when the wolf-cloaked priests had come down from the mountain at the height of winter and demanded the yearly blood-gelt from the tribes of Lokabrenna. Every youth of ten winters had to make the journey to the place of testing, where their palms were cut open by an ebon-clawed gauntlet and the blood collected in a tooth-rimmed chalice. Each child would kneel before the priest, whose eyes burned green behind his wolf-skull mask, while a shaven-headed thrall covered head to foot in tattoos placed his scarred hands on either side of his head. Luth shivered as he remembered the invasive presence within his skull, the unashamed violation of his innermost thoughts as what he now knew to be a Legio-sanctioned psyker tested the bounds of his synaptic connections and the robustness of his cerebral architecture. The words of the psyker had dominated his future from that moment.
‘Princeps grade.’
That day had seen him ripped from all he had ever known and marched into the deep forests at the foot of the mountains. He had expected a life of glory and privilege but such a life had to be earned. The priests abandoned him at the foot of the black and silver mountain without a word and indicated that he was to climb to the Oldblood fortress.
And climb he had, for three days through blizzards, avalanches and rockslides. He had climbed though his fingers and toes had turned black with cold. He had climbed past the ice statues of the great iron-skinned warrior engines of the Canidae, and had crawled over the razor-edged volcanic rocks that kept all but the chosen from daring to approach the titanic ice-locked gate cut into the flanks of the black and silver mountain.
Dying from hypothermia and near crippled with frostbite, he had fallen to his knees and rapped the frozen nub of his unfeeling fist against the vast portal. Though he had heard no door open nor felt anyone’s approach, there was suddenly a man standing next to him, swathed in animal pelts, bronzed plate and a stiffened cloak of oiled leather.
Only his eyes were visible through the frost-limned burnoose he wore, yellow orbs with machine circuitry crawling behind their predator’s gleam.
‘First lesson,’ growled the man. ‘Never kneel.’
And Luth never had, not once.
The years had taken their toll on his once slender and perfectly formed body, the demands of war transforming him into a still-living revenant, trapped forever in a sluicing tank of life-sustaining fluids.
Luth looked down at his body. It was just as he remembered it from that first climb, clean-limbed and willowy; almost too tall for the little weight he carried. He flexed the muscles in his shoulders as he trudged through the snow to the forested ridge where he had camped on the first night of his climb, when he had still thought the ascent of the black and silver mountain would be easy.
Eryks Skálmöld was waiting for him, crouched by a fire that blazed with a green flame in the lee of boulders the size of a Warlord’s head. Just as Luth had come to this place as he remembered himself, so too had the Moonsorrow. Where Luth was tall and rangy, Skálmöld had a brawler’s physique: broad shouldered, meaty and neckless. He wore matted furs around his body and wire totems wrapped his tattooed, muscular arms. He was unarmed, but that meant nothing in this place, where they themselves were weapons.
The ridge had the look of an arena, flanked on both sides by wild forests where the highland evergreens grew thickly, and beneath which all was darkness. The forest line was heaped with snow and a thousand eyes stared out from the darkness beneath the trees, like tiny candle flames of amber and black.
They watched Luth as he ascended to the ridge and stood across from the Moonsorrow.
‘You came,’ said Skálmöld.
‘You thought I wouldn’t?’
‘It crossed my mind.’
‘I am alpha, how could I not come?’
‘You sense your own weakness. You fear I am stronger.’
‘You are not stronger than me, Moonsorrow.’
Skálmöld shrugged. ‘I am or I am not. Until we put it to the test our words are meaningless.’
‘That is what you want? Pack?’
Skálmöld nodded, rolling his shoulders and baring his teeth. ‘Yes, that is what I want. Pack.’
‘You are not ready.’
‘Is that why you left Canis Ulfrica behind when the pack walked?’
‘You had no crew,’ said Luth.
‘Because you took them.’
‘I am alpha, and I take what I need. I needed a new moderati.’
Skálmöld circled the forest line, his teeth bared and his breath coming in heaving grunts.
‘When Lupa Capitalina walked on the dying world, I flew the Manifold,’ said Skálmöld. ‘I saw what you saw. You were back there again, on the world taken by the Great Devourer. The others might not see it, but I know you better than any of them. You are broken.’
‘Enough talking, Skálmöld,’ snarled Luth. ‘I am the Wintersun and you are but the Moonsorrow.’
‘There is only one way we walk away from here. In blood.’
‘In blood,’ said Luth. ‘But whatever the outcome, what is between us is done with. Agree to that, and we will settle this. Right here, right now.’
‘Agreed,’ said Skálmöld, spreading his arms as gleaming claws unsheathed from his fists.
The Wintersun’s claws snapped from his hand as he charged.
War-howls echoed from the black and silver mountain.
Claws slashed, teeth tore.
Blood spilled.
Stripped of familiar stars and the known regions of the Imperium, the polished inner slopes of Vitali’s cartographae dome had been an austere, hemispherical vault of cold metal and echoing space. The dying corona of Arcturus Ultra had blinded the Speranza to most of what lay beyond the galactic threshold, but with its dissipation, the emptiness within the dome was filling with every passing second. New suns winked into existence, distant galactic nebulae became clearer and the curious arrangement of corpse-stars that measurements in an earlier time had said were long-dead glittered with renewed fusion reactions.
Life-sustaining stars were dying and areas farther out into the wilds of interstitial space, where everything ought to be co
ld and dead, now teemed with celestial nurseries where new stars were being born. In these newly fertile regions, metals and life-sustaining chemicals had been seeded like a gardener preparing his soil for planting.
‘And I thought the readings we were taking before we arrived here were awry,’ said Vitali.
The entoptic machines worked into the polished face of the dome projected the newly-revealed volume of space around the Speranza, probing farther with each cycle of the surveyors – Vitali was wasting no time in manipulating the rotating levers on the wood-framed console to catalogue all he could.
Linya assisted him in this, insisting that she was well enough to work despite the injuries she had sustained aboard the Tomioka. The bruising had faded and she bore no outward sign of her brush with death at the hands of the robotic sentinels, but Vitali sensed something deeper troubling her than any pain she might still be feeling.
‘Did you see that one?’ asked Vitali, gesturing to a star system whose stellar bodies orbited one another with chaotic, elliptical wanderings. ‘A spectroscopic and eclipsing triple star. Three blue-white main sequence stars. Two are in close orbit and appear to revolve around each other once every nine Terran days.’
‘And they in turn orbit a third star once every one hundred and fifty days.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Vitali. ‘And to think, we never even knew these were here.’
‘Someone did once,’ said Linya, consulting a millennia-old tabulus of celestial accountings. ‘But they were recorded as being in the final stages of their existence and those readings were of light already hundreds of thousands of years old. They should have gone nova by now.’
‘And yet here we are,’ said Vitali, stepping away from the controls and beckoning the triple star system closer with the haptic implants in his clicking, metallic fingers. The stars magnified as they approached, graceful and ordered like clockwork by the primal forces of the galaxy.
Watching the dance of the stars, Vitali could easily imagine the hand of a watchmaker setting them in the heavens. He knew better than that. Ancient physical laws, set down nearly fourteen billion years ago in the opening moments of the universe’s birth, determined their movement and properties. Moments like that were miraculous enough without the presence of a creator.
‘Our predecessors would have wept to see what we can see,’ said Vitali, more to himself than to Linya. ‘Flamsteed, Maskelyne, Halley and the composer of Honovere… how they must have dreamed of such things, trapped as they were on Old Earth and forced to scrabble in the heavens for their knowledge. But for all that, I sometimes envy them, Linya.’
‘You envy them? Why? We know so much more than they did and we have discovered things they could never have begun to comprehend.’
Vitali nodded, setting the triple star back into place with a gentle wave. ‘All true, but think of how wondrous it must have been back then. When all you had was a polished mirror fashioned in a mould of dung and set in a wooden tube, sitting on a frosty hillside with an inefficient organic eye pressed to an imperfect lens.’
‘Give me the orbital galleries of Quatria any day,’ said Linya.
‘We continue their work, but they began it,’ pressed Vitali, feeling the need to impress upon his daughter how magnificent a time the heady days of early astronomy must have been. ‘Those men first brought the heavens within Mankind’s grasp. They denied the geocentric models, and they grasped towards concepts of deep time and distance. They made astronomy a science and they understood our place within the galaxy. Something we have since forgotten, I fear.’
Vitali stepped away from the control panel and walked through the emerging star maps of this region beyond the galactic fringe.
‘So rarely do we have the chance to just explore,’ he said. ‘All too often our works are subverted by Imperialistic concerns: identifying systems of military significance, locating worlds rich in materiel resources, breadbasket regions, asteroid belts to be used as staging areas or determining system suitabilities for star forts. How often are we afforded the opportunity to explore for the sheer joy of it and the act of exploration itself? A chance as rare as this should not be squandered, Linya, we should embrace it and revel in the simple joys of discovery.’
Linya smiled and it seemed a great burden had, if not removed itself entirely, at least eased its pressure upon her.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said. ‘But we still have a job to do, we still have to find a world of high enough mineral density to feed the forges. Magos Turentek and Magos Kryptaestrex are crying out for raw materials to keep the reconstruction work going.’
Vitali drew another system to his hands, centred upon a softly-glowing yellow dwarf star with a dozen planets clustered tightly together in various elliptical orbits. Three of the planets were too close to the star to be habitable, while the outermost seven were either vast gas giants or ice-locked rocks. But the fourth and fifth planets travelled in stable orbits within the band of space that allowed water to exist in liquid form.
‘Either of these should do,’ said Vitali. ‘Though if I were forced to chose, I’d say the fourth planet offers the best risk to reward ratio. I have taken the liberty of naming it Hypatia.’
Linya smiled. ‘A worthy name,’ she said, using the levers of the control panel to shift the focus lenses over to the projected worlds her father had brought up. Without the benefit of his haptic implants, she was forced to rely on archaic controls to bring up the noospheric tags from which she could pull information. The chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere appeared in shimmering bands of colour, together with deep-augur mineral scans of its lithosphere and oceans.
‘At this distance, a lot of these readings are approximate,’ she said. ‘But I think you are right. The fourth planet appears to be just what we’re looking for. Shall I exload this to Magos Kryptaestrex?’
‘Yes, I’m sure he’ll be pleased.’
‘I don’t think being pleased is a state with which the Master of Logistics is familiar.’
‘Very true, my dear,’ grinned Vitali. ‘I believe Magos Kryptaestrex views the Speranza’s supply decks as his own personal fiefdom and it infuriates him when people have the temerity to ask for things they need.’
Vitali laced his hands behind his back and continued his stroll through the constantly updating representation of space beyond the Milky Way. His path across the acid-etched floor, not unnaturally, took him towards the glimmering orrery of systems and worlds orbiting the shining star at the centre of the latticework of impossibly geometric stars.
‘And now we come to you, my mysterious friends,’ said Vitali, spreading his arms out and enlarging the system his extrapolation simulation had identified as being the source of the unimaginable power that had kick-started Arcturus Ultra’s rebirth.
‘Tell me, Linya,’ said Vitali, turning to face his daughter. ‘Do you still think there is no intelligent designer? Here we have an arrangement of systems whose geometrically perfect alignment clearly implies the presence of a watchmaker, blind or otherwise.’
Linya left the battered control terminal and joined her father in the midst of the orbiting systems. Each one followed a precise path through space, their relative speeds within the dome vastly increased to give their relationship a more obvious correlation. Just as the Imperium’s planets orbited suns within a star system, those systems in turn orbited the super-massive black hole at the galactic centre. And just as its celestial bodies orbited, so too did galaxies, circling around clusters of galaxies or some other vast centre of mass.
‘The scattering of stars and planets across the galaxy owes nothing to design,’ said Linya. ‘No matter how ordered they might at first appear. Only the all-encompassing forces of gravity, time, pressure and a host of other physical constants define how the structure of the universe evolves. You know that as well I do, so why the question?’
Vitali gestured
to the ordered movements and positions of the star systems orbiting the central world in the entoptically-generated imagery.
‘This arrangement would seem to contradict that supposition,’ said Vitali. ‘This is clearly a planned arrangement. And if this system is arranged according to a design, cannot that be extrapolated as being part of a universally ordered design? Perhaps such order exists, but we have not the senses or means to apprehend that order.’
‘Advocatus diaboli? Really?’
‘Indulge me.’
‘Very well, I agree there is the definite appearance of design here, which, in this case, suggests the work of a designer, but that does not make it so for the rest of the universe. If Archmagos Kotov is correct then this world is indeed one upon which we will find Telok–’
‘Difficult to see how it could not be a forge world, given the uniquely Mechanicus emissions surrounding it.’
‘If this is a forge world upon which we may find Telok, why can we discern next to nothing of it or the systems surrounding it with any clarity?’
‘Now you’re thinking,’ said Vitali, pleased Linya had grasped the inherent flaw in the map.
‘We must question the source,’ said Linya, nodding as one supposition supported another. ‘The majority of this data came from the Tomioka’s cogitators. And Telok is unlikely to have left every aspect of his forge world’s secrets encoded within a ship he intended to destroy.’
‘And…?’
‘And every shred of information we brought back from Katen Venia was exloaded by Galatea…’
‘An unreliable narrator if ever there was one,’ said Vitali.
‘Then we need to convince it to allow us access to the raw data in its memory.’
‘And you think it would let us?’
‘I doubt it,’ conceded Linya. ‘But if we are forced to question the veracity of Galatea’s information, then every aspect of this map must be considered tainted. We can rely on none of it, not even Hypatia.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 59
