Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Yes, yes, I am aware of that,’ said Vitali, pulling her close. ‘And it will be a grand adventure, I’m sure of it.’

  Linya smiled and nodded in agreement. ‘Though hopefully less eventful than the excursion to Katen Venia.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Vitali. ‘And you are sure you are recovered, my dear?’

  ‘I am, yes. The implants that blew out in the data overload have all been replaced, and the physical injuries have healed.’

  ‘I didn’t just mean the physical effects, Linya,’ said Vitali. ‘You almost died down there. Ave Deus Mechanicus, I don’t want to think about you being hurt, it turns my blood cold.’

  ‘Your oil/blood mix is maintained at precisely thirty-eight degrees.’

  ‘An organic turn of phrase, but you know what I mean,’ said Vitali. ‘You should never have been aboard that ship, and I should have known it was going to be trouble. If even half the stories the old logs tell of Telok are true, then there were bound to be automated defences. You shouldn’t even be descending to the surface of Hypatia.’

  ‘Why not? You are.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but I’m an old man in the last hurrah of his already over-extended life,’ said Vitali. ‘Who would deny me this last chance to walk a newborn world as part of a Titan’s crew?’

  ‘No-one,’ said Linya, inloading the shuttle’s final approach to the surface.

  ‘Ah,’ said Vitali, reading the same information. ‘We’re here.’

  The Processional Way that led from the Adamant Ciborium was a superhighway of noospheric light, a library and a transit route all in one. Kotov found introspection in the cool darkness of the Ciborium, but when he wished to revel in all that his order had achieved over the millennia, it was to the Processional Way that he came. Vaulted and coffered with gold and steel, the history of the Mechanicus unfolded above him in vast murals with none of the subtlety of Claeissens’s work

  This route through the Speranza was not about subtlety, but statement.

  Towering statues of bronze and gold-veined marble reached into the vaults above, where gene-spliced cherubs and servo-skulls drifted in lazy arcs, burbling soft binaric hymnals. Shimmering veils of light from the tessellated windows of stained glass fell in oil-shimmer bands of colour illuminating the votive strips of doctrina paper attached to the statues’ bases.

  A six-legged palanquin followed Kotov as he made his way from the Adamant Ciborium, its mono-tasked servitor driver periodically requesting him to board, but the archmagos felt the need to make this journey on foot. Or as close to on foot as a being with little more than a disembodied head and a truncated spinal cord could achieve. In the days since his audience with Surcouf, Kotov had remained ensconced within his robes of office. As the time of their arrival around Telok’s forge world approached, Kotov knew it was time to fully assume the mantle of an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  Beside him, Tarkis Blaylock matched his mechanised pace exactly, though his attached retinue of stunted servitors wheezed and puffed with the effort of keeping up. Between them, they had just orchestrated the final repair schedules for the Speranza, allocating resources and work-shifts as need and priority dictated. For a ship as complex as the Ark Mechanicus – and with their materiel resources still a morass of unknown variables – the task would have been onerous to anyone but senior adepts with high-functioning hexamathic implants.

  Lines of power squirmed over the floor’s hexagonal tiles at his every footfall, spreading word of his presence and passing their calculations into the ship’s network. In return, Kotov felt the ship’s wounded heart, seeing Galatea’s enmeshed presence in its every vital network.

  ‘You will be whole once again,’ said Kotov. ‘And free.’

  ‘Archmagos?’ asked Blaylock.

  Kotov shook his head. ‘Just thinking aloud, Tarkis.’

  Blaylock nodded, but said nothing. The business with Surcouf had reached past Blaylock’s normal, logical detachment from mortal concerns to provoke genuine anger; Kotov knew his Fabricatus Locum was still processing the reasons for his allowing Surcouf to escape punishment.

  Kotov stopped at the foot of a grand statue, exactly four hundred and ninety-six metres tall and rendered in polished silver-steel and glittering chrome.

  ‘Magos Zimmen,’ said Kotov. ‘Originator of Hexamathic Geometry. A personal hero of mine, you know. I wrote numerous monographs on her work when I was first inducted to the Cult Mechanicus.’

  ‘I am aware of that, archmagos,’ answered Blaylock. ‘I have, of course, inloaded them and factored them into my own work.’

  ‘It seems strange to think of a time before hexamathics, don’t you think? We rely on it so heavily now. It is part of every binaric code structure, part of every communication, yet we take it for granted, as though we will never lose it.’

  ‘Nor shall we, its usage is incorporated into every database.’

  Kotov looked up into Zimmen’s stoic countenance. ‘We are so sure of ourselves, Tarkis,’ he said. ‘Yes, we have encoded much of our data, but all it might take is one catastrophe for us to forget all we have learned. The Age of Strife nearly wiped us out, erased so much of what our species had achieved so thoroughly – one might be tempted to imagine it was a deliberate act of technological vandalism.’

  ‘We have learned from that,’ said Blaylock. ‘Our archives are scattered, multiple redundancies and duplicates exist on every forge world.’

  ‘Trust me, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘I know how easily a forge world can be lost better than anyone. I remember a saying from Old Earth that said civilisation was one meal away from barbarism. I believe we are little better.’

  Kotov walked on as the servitor atop the palanquin broadcast another boarding request.

  ‘Hexamathics is a good example,’ he said. ‘We take it for granted, but what if the STC to construct the implants that allow our brains to process the calculations was lost? Vast swathes of our current means of encrypted communication and data transfer would be rendered incomprehensible at a stroke. You and I are exchanging and updating our recent work-flow patterns as we speak on higher planes of noospheric transference, but remove our hexamathic implants and those data-streams would become unintelligible gibberish little better than scrapcode.’

  ‘As you say, archmagos,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘One might then ask why you risked a starship as valuable as the Speranza on so uncertain a venture as this? The battle against the eldar vessel has shown it to be a repository of technologies to which we do not yet have access.’

  ‘You mean why I risked it on the word of a fraudster like Surcouf?’

  ‘That is indeed my meaning.’

  Kotov paused in his walk and said, ‘Because I had become guilty of overweening pride, Tarkis. The Omnissiah in His wisdom saw fit to punish me for my hubris in believing that I could lift our order out of the darkness and into a new golden age by my intellect alone. My forge worlds were lost, my reputation in tatters. My fall from grace reminded me that without the Omnissiah, we are nothing; apes grubbing about in the dirt for scraps of an earlier civilisation. By following the mindstep signs the Machine-God leaves for us, we draw closer to the singularity that is the pinnacle of our aspirations, when the Machine-God becomes one with Mankind and elevates us to the level of super-intelligences.’

  ‘And you believe that Surcouf is one of those signs?’

  ‘He has to be,’ said Kotov, exloading the data-footprint the rogue trader had left in the Manifold in the years leading up to the expedition’s beginning. ‘His trading fleets were operating on the galactic fringes for years before he received a commission from Magos Alhazen to travel to the Arax system.’

  ‘Magos Alhazen of Sinus Sabeus? My mentor?’ asked Blaylock in astonishment.

  ‘The very same,’ replied Kotov.

  ‘The Speranza skirted the edges of the Arax system en route to the Halo Scar,’ s
aid Blaylock, calling up the route calculations of Azuramagelli and Linya Tychon. ‘What was the nature of the commission?’

  Kotov stopped as they approached the cliff-like bulkhead that separated the Processional Way from the more functional areas of the vast starship. Half a kilometre high, its geometric patterns were idealised representations of the golden ratio, and at its centre was a colossal Cog Mechanicus in coal-dark iron and glittering chrome.

  ‘A routine outsource request to bring back mineral samples from an abandoned Techsorcist outpost on a planet designated as Seren Ayelet. Surcouf’s ships duly returned with the requested samples, but six months later Roboute Surcouf made contact with my Martian holdings with news of something his ships had found within the system’s main asteroid belt.’

  ‘The distress beacon from the Tomioka’s saviour pod.’

  ‘Just so, Tarkis, just so,’ said Kotov. ‘And you are certainly aware of how statistically unlikely the odds are of a saviour pod being recovered in wilderness space, let alone within a dense asteroid belt. That the beacon survived transit of the Halo Scar was nothing short of miraculous and its discovery no less so. That it came to light in service of a task set by your late mentor was a link in the chain that stretched any notions of coincidence or happenstance beyond breaking point. The pieces were beginning to fall into place. I had the Speranza, a vessel capable of breaching the Halo Scar, and a stargazer whose cartography was showing marked discrepancies in the stellar topography of the very region I was to traverse. Truly, the Omnissiah could have given me no clearer signs.’

  Blaylock was stunned, and Kotov saw him struggling to comprehend the enormous web of causality that needed to combine to produce a confluence of factors so unlikely as to be virtually statistically impossible. Kotov saw the dense web of probability calculus interleaving throughout Blaylock’s noospheric aura and smiled as he saw the calculations fall apart as the numbers involved grew too large to manipulate by conventional algebra.

  ‘The Omnissiah has brought us here?’ asked Blaylock, dropping to his knees before the vast icon of the Cog Mechanicus. ‘I have always had faith in the Machine Spirit, but to see its workings laid out before me like this is… is…’

  ‘It is wondrous, my friend,’ said Kotov, placing a hand on Blaylock’s hooded head as divine radiance shone through the Processional Way and filled it with light.

  Even filtered through the crackling picters of Amarok’s surveyor suite, the cascading bands of ochre and umber in Hypatia’s sky reminded Linya of the years she had spent as a youth in the volcanic uplands of the Elysium Planitia. Then, she had been a gifted initiate of Magos Gasselt, bound to his Martian observatoria cadres as Oculist Secundus; now she was Cartographae Stellae of her own trans-orbital gallery. With numerous technological achievements to her name, Linya’s rank authorised her to petition the Fabricator General himself, requisition planetary tithes and assemble Imperial forces to serve the goals of the Mechanicus.

  Yet she had done none of these things, because she was, at heart, an explorator.

  At first she had explored space through the multiple lenses and orbital relays of Mars – and then Quatria – but the gradual realisation that just observing the far corners of the galaxy wasn’t enough had come to her as she and her father had studied the growing inaccuracies arising in their maps of space around the Halo Scar. Linya had grown tired of looking at distant stars and systems; she wanted to feel their light upon her skin, to taste unknown air and tread the soil of those worlds she had only known as smudges of light on electrostatically-charged, photosensitive plates.

  She smiled as she realised her reasons for joining the Kotov fleet were much the same as Roboute Surcouf’s and wondered what he would make of walking the surface of an alien world as part of a god-machine’s crew.

  The interior of the Warhound was humid and stank of heated oils and blessed lubricants. The compartment in which feral tech-priests, too long in the service of a Titan Legion, had implanted her was coffin-sized and designed for beings whose comfort was of no concern to the Titan’s princeps.

  Gunnar Vintras had spoken to Linya and her father only to remind them that he would tolerate nothing less than the same level of competence as the servitors they were replacing, a needlessly patronising remark that only a discreet noospheric nudge from her father had kept her from addressing. The princeps of Warhounds were notoriously arrogant and reckless, and Vintras appeared to revel in that preconception with a relish that bordered on the ridiculous.

  He had assigned Linya to operate the port-side stabilisation array, a task that involved compensating for any ill-judged steps the princeps might make and running the real-time gyroscopic calculations that allowed a fifteen-metre-tall bipedal war machine to remain upright at any given moment.

  To a hexamathical-savantus secundus grade, such calculations were child’s play, which allowed Linya to savour this new experience to the full.

  There was something pleasing in the simplistic nature of the controls available, and Linya had to remind herself that she was operating a position normally occupied by a servitor. She had coaxed a shimmering holographic display that clearly hadn’t been used in decades to life and the planet’s surface swam into view in ripples of photons.

  The Adeptus Mechanicus had descended to the surface of Hypatia like a rapacious swarm of tyranid feeder organisms and promised to be no less thorough in stripping the planet of its resources. Titanic mining machines deployed in numbers that made the expedition to Katen Venia resemble a dilettantes’ excursion.

  Each harvest force landed where orbital surveys had revealed the most promising deposits of the required materials, and almost as soon as each cadre of machines rumbled from their landers they began smashing the planet’s surface apart. Underground caverns filled with chemically-rich oceans were drained, while earth-churning digger leviathans descended on previously bombarded sites to tear open the planet’s crust to a depth of hundred and thirty kilometres, exposing the ductile, mineral-rich seams of the superheated asthenosphere.

  Magos Kryptaestrex oversaw the resource gathering as Azuramagelli coordinated the mammoth task of shipping the excavated raw materials back to the phosphor-bright comet of the Speranza hanging in low orbit.

  With the harvesters excavating, drilling, siphoning and refining a continent’s worth of the planet’s surface into materials usable by the Speranza’s forges, Princeps Vintras walked them far beyond the scattered dig-sites and into regions that had not registered enough interest in the geological surveys.

  The swaying motion of the Warhound took a little getting used to, but once Linya had acclimatised to its loping gait, she found it easier to concentrate on experiencing the world around her. Her father, ensconced in the opposite stabilisation array, sent a constant stream of excited chatter directly to her cranial implants, bypassing the engine’s Manifold and pointing out curious geographical features of Hypatia’s birth pangs.

  Though still millions of years old, Vitali estimated that Hypatia was in the mid-stages of its planetary development, with its landmasses still largely confined to one vast supercontinent that was only slowly being broken up by the gradual movement of tectonic plates. Its oceans were viscous bodies of toxic black liquid and its mountains were nightmarish spines of volcanic eruptions and sudden, violent earthquakes.

  ‘Princeps Vintras appears to relish the prospect of running his engine close to regions that ought to be best avoided,’ said Linya, working to compensate for the brittle nature of the ground beneath the Titan’s clawed feet as the Warhound stomped down a sheer-sided canyon of orange rock.

  ‘Warhound drivers,’ said Vitali, as though that was all that needed to be said.

  ‘What do you make of this canyon?’ asked Linya. ‘It appears to be almost perfectly straight. Unnaturally so.’

  ‘You suspect an artificial hand in its formation?’ teased Vitali. ‘Like the canals of Mars?’

/>   Linya smiled at her father’s mention of the ancient belief that Mars had once been inhabited by an extinct race of beings who had carved vast channels close to the planet’s equator. As laughable as the notion of the Cebrenian face, which had in fact been made real by an early Martian sect of killers in homage to another half-remembered myth.

  ‘No, of course not. Unless Telok paused here,’ she said, adjusting the gyroscopic servos as the Warhound dropped down a sharp split in the rock and turned in towards the mouth of an almost perfectly V-shaped valley. ‘We know nothing certain about the power of the Breath of the Gods. If it can regenerate a star, then a little bit of terraforming should present no problem.’

  ‘You could be right, daughter, and while this region does evince a level of artificiality, it seems somewhat perfunctory for an artefact capable of stellar engineering, don’t you think?’

  ‘Admittedly,’ said Linya, shearing a thread of consciousness to mesh with the passive auspex of the striding war machine. The data-feeds were of a more martial nature than she was used to, each return a measure of threat and war-utility; cover ratios, potential ambush locations, dead ground, blind spot and free-fire zones.

  She filtered out the majority of such inputs, leaving the auspex panel mostly blank, for what did a Warhound princeps care for the composition of the rock, the atmospheric make-up or the wavelengths of the various spectra of light? Linya brought the environmental data to the fore, gathering information on the Warhound’s immediate surroundings with every sweep of the auspex.

  Yet the most telling detail wasn’t one she gathered through the numerous auspex feeds on the Titan’s hull, it was through the swaying pict image from the external picters. The walls of the valley swept past the Titan, striated bands of sedimentary rock laid down over millions of years and, looking at the evidence before her, it suggested that this valley had not been ripped into existence by tectonic movement at all.

  ‘Father, are you seeing this?’ she said.