But if his delaying tactic bought time for the archmagos to re-establish control of the Speranza’s servitors, it would be a price worth paying.
Saiixek gasped as he felt a sudden thrust of cold within his physical volume.
Such was the level of disconnect from his organic form, it took him several seconds to comprehend that his body had been injured. Saiixek looked down to see a length of white steel jutting from his body, a gracefully curved sword blade of non-Imperial design.
‘How curious,’ he said, as the blade was withdrawn and stabbed home three more times.
This time there was no ignoring the pain and Saiixek fell to his knees. Blood and oil spilled from the precision-cut wounds in his body, flooding from his internal structures at a rate that he had not the capacity to know was mortal with any sense other than his eyes.
He looked up as a woman circled around from behind him, clad in form-fitting armour of emerald plates. She wore a bone coloured helmet with a long red plume and bulbous extrusions at the gorget like some form of stinger. Her cloak of gold and green billowed in the vortices of hot and cold air, and her ivory sword dripped oil-dark droplets of his blood to the mezzanine floor.
‘Eldar?’ asked Saiixek. ‘Ridiculous. You cannot be here.’
‘You destroyed our vessel,’ said the eldar warrior-woman. ‘Now we destroy yours.’
‘Illogical,’ said Saiixek. ‘You will die too.’
‘To prevent your master from acquiring such power, we would die a thousand deaths.’
‘Outrageous hyperbole,’ said Saiixek, slumping against a control panel as the life flooded out of him.
‘What do you mean, you can’t get any closer?’ cried Vitali, his desperation clear even over the internal vox from the cargo deck.
‘I can’t say it any clearer,’ replied Roboute. ‘We’re hooked on an e-mag tether and the Speranza’s not reeling us in. I can’t raise anyone on the embarkation deck either.’
‘Please, we have to get back aboard! Linya will die if we don’t get her to a medicae.’
‘I know that, damn you,’ snapped Roboute, instantly regretting his outburst. ‘But unless you can override this tether, we’re not going anywhere. The shuttle’s trying to link with the embarkation deck’s data-engines, but so far no luck. We’re not part of Azuramagelli and Kryptaestrex’s shipping timetable, and there’s no one answering who can override it.’
‘The Speranza is in lockdown…’ said Vitali. ‘Something terrible must have happened, an accident or unexpected event.’
‘So we’re stuck here?’
‘Until they bring us in, yes,’ said Vitali, and Roboute heard a father’s terror at the loss of his child.
It was a terror he shared.
The Renard’s shuttle was stuck in a holding pattern below the ventral fantail of the Speranza, kept a fixed distance from the Ark Mechanicus by the same e-mag tether that would normally pull them through the gravimetric turbulence surrounding the enormous vessel. Their lift-off had been unscheduled and would no doubt earn them a stern warning from Magos Azuramagelli, but this was an emergency and Roboute was willing to risk any censure to get Linya to a medicae quicker.
Tears rolled down Roboute’s face at the thought of Linya Tychon’s death.
He understood there was no prospect of a union between them; he’d accepted that. Instead, he’d been looking forward to a growing friendship, but even that looked unlikely.
The distress signal from Amarok had been a howling bray of agony, a shriek of unimaginable pain that was instantly recognisable as belonging to a god-machine. Following that brash cry for help came a plea from Vitali Tychon, begging Roboute to fly to their rescue. The signal had been abruptly cut off, and seeing that Legio Sirius recovery craft would not reach the planet’s surface for over an hour, Roboute had immediately lifted off.
The Renard’s shuttle landed amid the devastation of a ruined city, but Roboute’s myriad questions concerning the unexpected metropolis died in his throat as he saw the horrific injuries suffered by Linya.
Only Vitali Tychon had emerged from Amarok’s wreckage without significant injuries. With the exception of Princeps Vintras, the crew of the Warhound were dead and the war machine crippled, listing over a sealed crevasse with one leg sunk fully into the cracked ground. Though he still lived, Vintras had not emerged unscathed; Manifold feedback left him weeping and paralysed, his nervous system wracked with sympathetic agony at the mortal wounding of his engine.
But his injuries were nothing compared to what Linya Tychon had suffered.
Roboute barely recognised the young, vivacious girl he’d met at Colonel Anders’s dinner, her flesh burned black and raw, with only her upper body having escaped the worst of the hellish inferno. Her father was keeping her alive, barely, with noospheric connections to her neuromatrix blocking the pain centres of her brain, but he was no medicae, and he could do nothing to treat the physical injuries that would undoubtedly kill her. They’d got her on board the shuttle as gently as they could and followed the most direct course for the Speranza. The shuttle’s servitors were administering first aid as best they could with their limited knowledge of human physiology, but without specialised medicae treatment, Linya would soon be dead.
And now this…
Roboute had tried every trick in the book to break the Speranza’s tether, every risky evasion technique and downright dangerous manoeuvre he’d learned in the skies of Ultramar, but nothing had come close to even weakening its grip. They were trapped out here, hooked like a fish on a line, unable to close or break away from the Ark Mechanicus.
A warning light flickered to life on Roboute’s avionics panel, and he checked the readout to make sure he was reading it correctly, but hoping he wasn’t.
‘Hell…’ he said, standing and looking out through the shuttle’s armourglass canopy. ‘Oh, this is so very not good…’
No doubt about it. The shimmering blue-hot plasma glow within the Speranza’s containment fields was fading, which meant the engines were no longer supplying thrust.
Which meant its orbit was decaying.
The Ark Mechanicus was going down.
The gathering took place in the forward observatorium above the dorsal transit arrays, a central location that allowed the senior military forces the best options for deployment throughout the ship. From here the mag-lev transit trains were within easy reach, and the main internal teleporter array was in the process of being powered up by a chanting choir of tech-priests – with the accompanying ritual catechisms being voiced by carefully coached deck menials instead of servitors.
Starlight filtering through the upper reaches of Hypatia’s atmosphere fell in glittering beams of umber and magenta, illuminating the terrazzo floor panels and reflecting across the multitude of stargazing optical machines that hung from the polished glass dome or stood on vast girder structures.
The commanders of the Speranza’s fighting forces gathered to hear Archmagos Kotov’s briefing, each rapidly digesting hastily prepared dossiers on the mutiny’s ringleaders. Magos Dahan and Sergeant Tanna waited for Kotov to begin, while Colonel Anders continued to peruse his briefing documents.
‘What we have here is a full-scale mutiny,’ said Kotov to the assembled warriors, wishing to incite in them the same righteous anger at events taking place below decks. ‘A bondsman named Abrehem Locke has defied the legal and holy writ of the Mechanicus and incited rebellion throughout the Speranza. I want him and his cadre of supporters hunted down and killed.’
‘How many targets are you talking about?’ asked Tanna.
Magos Blaylock answered the Space Marine’s question: ‘Six that we know of. Bondsman Locke himself and three others who were collared along with him on Joura, Vannen Coyne, Julius Hawke and Ismael de Roeven.’
‘De Roeven? Is he the servitor with the returned memories?’ asked Anders.
‘So b
elow the waterline rumour would have it,’ said Blaylock, ‘Though such a thing has never been documented before, so must be viewed with suspicion. In addition, Bondsman Locke is accompanied by a rogue Mechanicus overseer, Totha Mu-32, and an imprinted arco-flagellant, Rasselas X-42. Both should be considered extremely dangerous.’
‘An arco-flagellant?’ asked Anders with a sudden intake of breath. ‘I thought they were purely Inquisition weapons.’
‘They are,’ said Dahan, flexing the articulated joints of his multiple arms. ‘But who do you think makes them for the inquisitors?’
‘Where did it come from?’ askied Anders.
‘Does it matter?’ replied Tanna. ‘We do not need to know where it came from to kill it.’
‘No, but if I’m going to put my men in harm’s way, I want to know everything I can about this arco-flagellant. I saw one of them in action on Agripinaa. The thing went through a martyr-company of Bar-el penal troops who’d gone over to the enemy. It wasn’t pretty. And if this bondsman has one, then I’m going to damn well know everything there is to know about it.’
‘We do not have time for this, Colonel Anders,’ said Kotov. ‘If the servitors do not return to their stations within the next two hours and eleven minutes, the Speranza’s orbit will have decayed to a level that will mean a catastrophic re-entry is inevitable.’
‘Then answer my question quickly.’
‘Very well,’ said Kotov. ‘When I discovered the Speranza, it was unfinished, a buried skeleton of a starship that was virtually complete, but not entirely so. Many of its deeper structures and chambers were left unexplored or were inaccessible. It is likely this arco-flagellant was implanted with weaponry and pacification routines, but left as a tabula rasa for the designated inquisitor to imprint upon it.’
‘So it’s been sitting there like a bloody time bomb, just waiting for someone to stumble over it and set it loose?’
Kotov did not care for the Cadian colonel’s tone, but recognised he had little time in which to take umbrage. ‘Essentially, yes.’
Anders nodded. ‘That was careless of you. It’s like me forgetting where I parked my Baneblade squadrons and being surprised when someone drives them over me.’
‘What information do you have on Bondsman Locke’s current whereabouts?’ asked Tanna, cutting off Kotov’s bilious response. ‘Give me his location and my men will use these internal teleporters to attack with a swift and merciless response.’
‘For reasons I cannot explain, we are currently unable to track Bondsman Locke or his immediate co-conspirators via their sub-dermal fealty identifiers,’ said Blaylock. ‘It seems likely they have been removed or shorted out by Totha Mu-32. Which would explain why the regular snatch teams of armsmen and cyber-mastifs were unable to locate them after their initial display of mutinous behaviour.’
‘This just gets better and better,’ said Anders.
‘The mutiny began in Feeding Hall Eighty-Six,’ continued Kotov. ‘In the short time since then, it appears to have spread to neighbouring decks. Every servitor aboard the Speranza is currently in an enforced dormancy state from which they refuse to be roused, but there are tens of thousands of bondsmen aboard this vessel. And every one of them heard Locke’s broadcast.’
‘So we could be looking at a ship-wide army of mutineers?’ asked Tanna.
‘You people,’ said Anders with a shake of the head. ‘You keep calling this a mutiny, but that’s not what this is. I can’t believe you don’t see it.’
‘If it is not a mutiny, then what would you call it, colonel?’ demanded Magos Dahan.
‘It’s a strike,’ said the Cadian colonel. ‘Mutineers want to take over a vessel, but that’s not what these men are doing. I’ve listened to what Bondsman Locke’s saying, and I don’t think he wants a starship of his own.’
‘Then what does he want?’ asked Kotov.
‘You heard what he wants,’ said Anders. ‘He wants the men of this ship to be treated like human beings. Don’t get me wrong, these bondsmen are legitimate servants of the Mechanicus, and they’re here to do a job, just like every grunt that joins my regiment. But what every Cadian officer knows, and what the Mechanicus has forgotten, is that the way to get the best out of a man isn’t to beat him to death with a stick, but to beat him just enough that he’s grateful for a hint that the carrot even exists.’
‘Such a thing is unheard of,’ said Kotov, horrified at the idea of entering into negotiations with bonded servants. ‘They are indentured workers, bound to the purpose of the Mechanicus and the will of the Omnissiah. To allow them to believe that their demands might be met is to break with thousands of years of tradition and precedent. It cannot be done. I refuse to entertain such a vile notion!’
‘I don’t think you have a choice,’ replied Anders. ‘In two hours this ship is going down unless you offer these men something that’ll convince Abrehem Locke to put the servitors back to work.’
‘You believe I should stand before these… strikers and address their so-called grievances?’
Anders shook his head and said, ‘No, archmagos, I think these negotiations need a human face.’
Roboute had seen and heard many bizarre things in his time as a rogue trader, but the looping recording coming over the vox from the Speranza had to rank as one of the strangest. Hearing a man called Abrehem Locke making a stand for the rights of his fellow men on a Mechanicus ship might, under different circumstances, have stirred the underdog in Roboute’s heart.
Leaving the shuttle flying on its own autonomous systems, Roboute wound a path through the companionways and corridors of the shuttle to the cramped crew berth where his own servitors – which, thankfully, seemed free of whatever rebellious streak had overtaken those of the Speranza – had taken the wounded Linya.
Roboute smelled the stench of her burned flesh long before he reached the berth.
Trying to hide his horror as best he could, Roboute stood in the doorway and felt his fist clench in anger. He didn’t know where to direct that anger, no one was to blame for this. According to Vitali, Princeps Vintras had worked miracles in keeping the Titan upright as long as he had. What god was there to rail against for sending the earthquake?
Linya lay encased in a counterseptic dermal wrap that kept contaminants from reaching her burned and exposed flesh, but did nothing to begin the healing process. A basic bio-monitor was hooked up to her arms and an oxygen mask was clamped over her mouth and nose. Her scalp was raw and red where her hair had burned away in clumps, and milky tears leaked from the corners of cracked augmetic eyes. The fire in the Titan had blinded her, but that was probably a good thing.
Concealed beneath the dermal wrap, Linya’s legs were crooked lumps of fused meat and burned muscle; little more than ruined nubs of bone. They were fleshless below the shin, and even if she lived, Linya would never again walk as she had done before.
Vitali Tychon sat beside his daughter, resting a spindly mechanical hand next to her on the bed. A slender copper-jacketed wire ran from the back of Linya’s skull to an identical port behind Vitali’s ear. The old man looked to have aged a hundred years since Roboute had last seen him; no mean feat for a man centuries old.
Vitali didn’t look up as Roboute rapped a knuckle against the doorframe, but nodded briefly in acknowledgement of his presence.
‘I take it there is no change in the tether’s status,’ said Vitali, phrasing his words as a statement instead of a question. Vitali would likely know before Roboute if anything changed aboard the Speranza.
‘No,’ said Roboute. ‘I’m afraid not.’
Vitali shrugged. ‘I could almost admire this Locke fellow were it not for the fact that his actions will in all likelihood see my daughter dead.’
‘They’re trying to get things settled, Vitali,’ said Roboute.
‘Yes, I heard that a parley has been arranged in the main port-side emba
rkation deck. Apparently the revolutionaries have seized it and are preventing any resupply vessels from docking.’
‘Colonel Anders is en route to negotiate with Locke,’ said Roboute. ‘He’s a good man, and if there’s a way to sort this, he’ll find it.’
‘The outcome will not matter to us,’ said Vitali sadly. ‘The Speranza’s orbit is decaying too sharply, and since this shuttle is not as thickly hulled or shielded as the Ark Mechanicus, we will die long before it. We will be torn apart by gravitational stress forces or burned up by atmospheric friction, take your pick. Assuming, of course, the Cadians don’t just gun everyone down and doom us all anyway.’
‘I got the impression that Colonel Anders is too smart for that kind of gunboat diplomacy.’
‘I hope you are right, captain,’ sighed Vitali. ‘In any case, it is clever of the archmagos to send a human to speak to Locke. A less inhuman face might make all the difference.’
Vitali reached out to place his hand gently on Linya’s shoulder, the clicking fingers of his metallic hand clenching into a fist before they made contact.
‘She always wanted to hold onto her baseline body-plan as long as possible,’ said Vitali, and even with his back turned, the man’s grief was entirely obvious. ‘Seems like such a silly thing to have insisted on, but she was quite adamant.’
‘I don’t blame her,’ said Roboute. ‘It’s easy to forget your humanity when you don’t see it in the mirror every day.’
‘That’s the kind of thing she used to say.’
‘She’ll get through this,’ said Roboute, ‘She’s a strong one. I hadn’t got to know her well, but that much I could tell.’
‘You are not wrong, young man,’ said Vitali, finally turning to face him.
Nothing could have prepared Roboute for the deathly pallor and gaunt death mask of Vitali’s face.
His eyes were sunken deep into their sockets; though the majority of his flesh was artificial, there was no disguising the suffering he was experiencing.
‘Imperator, are you all right?’ asked Roboute.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 66
