The feeling that there was a target on his back or that a noose was slowly closing on him was getting stronger, and he had to fight the urge to spin around and try to catch a glimpse of his pursuer. Whoever or whatever had its eye on him would make itself known to him soon enough.
He passed shrines to the Omnissiah, to the Emperor and to things he couldn’t identify. Some appeared to be little more than votive offerings to some avatar that might charitably be considered an aspect of the Machine-God, while others were too disturbing to be connected to the Cult Mechanicus.
Some were clearly intended as little more than petty rebellions, where others were of a more sinister appearance, with items hung from the ad-hoc arrangements that Roboute didn’t want to look at too closely. Others appeared to be newly-erected shrines to Abrehem Locke and his apostles: the Red Ruin, the Angel Return’d, Blessed Hawke and Coyne of the Wound.
Roboute shook his head at the ridiculousness of these latter shrines, having heard Ven Anders and Captain Hawkins tell him the truth about Abrehem Locke’s compatriots. But wherever men and women were confined without hope, they would make their own. Even in the darkest times, the human mind was capable of fashioning its own light.
He passed beneath a towering lancet archway and entered a long processional nave filled with statuary: robed adepts of the Cult Mechanicus arranged in two facing rows running the length of the chamber. Each was around ten metres tall and their projecting surfaces were thick with dust, as were the interlinked hexagonal tiles of the floor. Roboute remembered when he had first come aboard the Speranza, and Magos Blaylock had escorted them to Archmagos Kotov in the Adamant Ciborium. The statues there had been toweringly magnificent, sculptural likenesses of the greatest minds of the Mechanicus.
Who were these figures?
Were they men and women whose contributions had been outmoded or surpassed?
A deep sadness filled Roboute as he walked slowly between the statues of the forgotten magi, wondering why this place was now unvisited and abandoned. He paused beside a robed priest of Mars and looked up into the shadows beneath the hood.
‘Who were you?’ asked Roboute, the echoes of his voice swallowed by the centuries of dust. ‘And what did you do? Someone thought you were important enough to warrant a statue.’
The statue stared across the chamber impassively, and Roboute knelt beside the carved plaque on its plinth and wiped away the dust.
‘Magos Vahihva of Pharses,’ said Roboute. ‘The rest of the ship may have forgotten you, but I’ll remember you. I’ll find out who you were and I’ll make sure I remember it. I know the Mechanicus say they never delete anything, but not deleting something isn’t the same as remembering it.’
Roboute stood and looked up at the unknowable face of Magos Vahihva as an overwhelming sense of calm spread through him. He smiled and ran a hand through his hair, before straightening his jacket and brushing stray particles of dust from his cuffs.
‘About bloody time you showed yourself,’ he said.
‘You were aware of my presence?’ said a voice with a breathy, lyrical quality he hadn’t heard for many years. He closed his eyes as he turned around, savouring the cadences of the voice as it defied the chamber’s acoustics and resonated throughout its length.
‘I was, but only because I’ve been around your people before,’ said Roboute, finally opening his eyes. ‘I hope this encounter is as pleasant and non-violent as the last.’
A woman in armour that looked to have been crafted from ceramic and alabaster stood opposite him. She was tall, with a leanness to her frame that was both beguiling and somehow at odds with how his brain told him a woman’s body ought to be proportioned. A helmet with horns like antlers sat on the plinth of the statue behind her, and he couldn’t help but notice the polished pistol strapped to her thigh and the long, bejewelled sword sheathed at her shoulder.
‘I am not going to kill you,’ she said.
‘That’s reassuring,’ replied Roboute with what he hoped was his most winning smile. He’d essentially engineered this meeting, though only now did he truly understand the tantalising sense of familiarity he’d felt on the embarkation deck.
The eldar woman’s face was sculpturally perfect, a pleasingly proportioned oval with large eyes and a tousled mass of scarlet hair entwined with glittering stones and golden beads. Her lips were a pleasing shade of blue, but pursed together in a way that made her seem inordinately angry.
In fact, now that he looked closely, he saw her apparently expressionless face was in fact taut with suppressed rage, an icy fury that simmered just beneath the surface. Despite her earlier words, Roboute suddenly doubted the wisdom of this course of action. He took a faltering step back towards Magos Vahihva as she approached him with a liquid fluidity that left no trace of her passing in the dust.
‘You are Roboute Surcouf,’ she said, not posing the words as a question.
‘Yes.’
‘And you have spent time aboard an eldar craftworld.’
‘Yes.’
She stopped in front of him as he backed up against Magos Vahihva’s plinth. Her breath was a contradictory mix of warm honey and sharp lemon. ‘You understand how rare it is for one of your kind to set foot on a craftworld?’
Finally, a question.
‘Yrlandriar of Alaitoc told me that, yes.’
‘Alaitoc? Yes, that makes sense,’ she said, cocking her head to the side and looking at him strangely, as though some part of a puzzle had just fallen into place for her. ‘Its people have always been foolishly trusting. Too eager to seek the middle ground instead of choosing a direct course of action.’
‘You know me,’ said Roboute, daring a question of his own, ‘but who are you?’
‘Bielanna Faerelle, Farseer of Craftworld Biel-Tan,’ she said, following that with what sounded like the opening bars of a song until Roboute realised she was saying the name in her native tongue. He ran the sounds in his head again and compared them to the human version of the name she’d said, dredging up memories of frustrating afternoons spent in a forest of crystal trees that looked oddly like humanoid figures.
‘Fairest light of… distant suns?’ he ventured.
Her eyes widened and he laughed at the surprise in her eyes.
‘We’re not all barbarians, you know,’ he said. ‘Some of us actually wash too.’
Bielanna ignored his sarcasm and said, ‘Did the Alaitocii teach you our language?’
‘Yrlandriar taught me a few words here and there,’ said Roboute modestly. He was far from fluent, but nor was he ignorant of the rudiments of eldar language.
‘Like an owner teaches his pet the commands to sit or beg,’ said Bielanna.
Anger touched Roboute. ‘More like a master instructing a novice,’ he said in conversational eldar.
She laughed in derision and shook her head. ‘None of your kind can master the eldar language beyond grunting a few basic phrases. And your analogy is flawed, it infers the novice could go on to become a master. That is not the case.’
‘I’ve heard differently,’ said Roboute, tiring of her condescension and deciding a change of tack was required. ‘Why did you attack our fleet in the Halo Scar?’
Her face changed in an instant, her slender fingers curled into fists.
‘What choice did I have?’ she snarled, her porcelain doll features transforming from serene beauty to bilious anger in a heartbeat. ‘I flew the paths of the skein and saw what harm your foolish quest might wreak.’
Roboute struggled to follow her internal logic. ‘You’re saying you killed our ships over something we might do?’
Bielanna shook her head and let out a vexed hiss. ‘You mon-keigh are so terrifyingly ignorant of the nature of causality it is a wonder you have not already plunged into species-extinction. You blunder through space like a wilful child who screams and wails when the universe do
es not bend to his will, turning a blind eye to consequences that displease you.’
Glitter light built in her eyes and Roboute remembered Yrlandriar telling him that farseers were powerful war-psykers, as versed in the arts of death as they were in the arts of prognostication. Once again, Roboute realised he had let the appearance of a woman blind him to the truth that she was not what she seemed. In Linya’s case that had cost him a little embarrassment and earned him a measure of humility. Here it could kill him.
‘What is it you think we are going to do?’ he asked.
She sighed and said, ‘It would be like explaining a symphony to a ptera-squirrel.’
‘Try me, I’m cleverer than I look.’
‘This thing that you seek,’ said Bielanna. ‘It can reignite dying stars and shape entire star systems. Its power can unmake time and space and make a mockery of the universal dance. Do you really think your upstart race of savages is ready to be the custodians of such a thing?’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Roboute. ‘But if it’s so dangerous, why don’t you just go and get it yourself or destroy it if it’s too dangerous to exist?’
Her fractional hesitation was all the answer he needed.
‘After the battle in the Halo Scar, the shipmasters thought you’d escaped, but you didn’t, did you?’ said Roboute. ‘Your ship must have been destroyed and you had to board the Speranza to escape. You’re the ones that have been killing the work crews below the waterline.’
‘Your reckless quest into the unknown has cost eldar lives, so why should I care for the lives of their killers? Why should meaningless flicker-souls be of any consequence to me, when your kind are going to murder my children before they are born?’
Roboute endured her venom though he understood little save her anger. Much of it was the bitter spite attributed to the eldar in Imperial propaganda, but her last words stretched his understanding to breaking point.
‘Kill your… what?’ he asked. ‘We haven’t killed any children.’
‘Nor will you, for the potential for their birth is fading,’ said Bielanna. ‘With every second you travel towards this moraideiin world, their life-thread from the future to the present grows ever fainter.’
‘Moraideiin? I don’t know what that means. You mean Telok’s forge world?’
‘Telok, is he one of your machine-men?’
‘You don’t know?’
Her face flickered, and on any human expression it would have been meaningless – a muscular spasm or a nervous tic – but in the face of an eldar it was tantamount to a murderer’s inadvertent admission of guilt.
Suddenly it made sense to Roboute. ‘You’re a farseer, but you don’t have any power, do you? It’s this whole region of space and the Breath of the Gods. Something in what it did to Arcturus Ultra is stopping you from seeing the future, isn’t it?’
She moved so quickly it was like a skipping image on a picter. One minute she was standing before him, the next he was pinned to Magos Vahihva’s plinth with her hand at his chest and her sword at his neck. Phosphor-bright will-o’-the-wisp danced in her oval pupils, and Roboute tasted the bitter, ashen-cold taste of psychic energy in his mouth as it filled with coppery saliva.
‘Will I show you what power I have?’ she asked, her voice stripped of its previously lyrical quality and all the more terrifying for it. ‘Shall I burn the primitive brain in your skull or curse your soul to wander the void for eternity? Will I melt the flesh from your bones with balefire or shall I simply cut your throat and watch you bleed to death? I can end your life in the blink of an eye, and you say I have no power?’
Roboute held his breath as Bielanna’s eyes bored into him, the hypnotically bright sparks in her eyes swelling until they shone like twin pools of starlight.
‘Reveal to me everything you know of this Telok,’ commanded Bielanna, and Roboute felt her presence within his skull like a silk-gloved hand stroking the surface of his mind. ‘You will tell me everything regarding this voyage. And then you will return to your fellow mon-keigh and forget that we ever spoke.’
Roboute nodded, as though this were the most sensible thing she had suggested.
‘And when I have need of an agaith, you will be the hidden blade in my hand.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will.’
Any fears that, upon achieving his goal, Kotov would be disappointed by what he found at the end of his quest had been shattered utterly in the last three days. The final approach to Telok’s forge world had been a sensory overload in unique celestial phenomena. Not only were the star systems around the forge world clustered tighter than any other system-grouping Kotov knew, but the Kuiper belt, planetary bodies and asteroid fields within the central system travelled in orbits as precise as any engineered by an atomic clockmaker.
The system – which Kotov still insisted on leaving unnamed – comprised twelve planets, each one equidistant from its inner and outer neighbour. All were of roughly Terran size and composition, with the exception of three gas giants in the system’s central belt, between which vast fields of asteroid debris hung in glimmering curtains of ejected matter and ice.
The impression was of rocky fragments on the floor of a sculptor’s workshop, of discarded components from some vast, and yet unfinished, engineering works. Such was the unnatural order imposed on the system that even Vitali Tychon had been coaxed from his daughter’s sickbed to provide stellar analysis and plot new cartographae charts. Though every moment away from Linya chafed the venerable stargazer, even he was held mesmerised by the dizzying ramifications of this system.
The bridge of the Speranza, normally a place of continual binaric back and forth, coded hymnals and clattering servitor operation, was now draped in reverent hush. Though no one worthy of the rank of Cult Mechanicus gave any credence to the notions of any deity beyond the God of All Machines, it was hard not to imagine the hand of a divine creator in the celestial architecture of this star and its attendant worlds.
Even the solar wind was a thing of beauty.
The rush of electrons and protons flaring from the upper atmosphere of the star was being filtered through the Speranza’s augmitters, and the normally chaotic interaction of particles was rendered into a geomagnetic symphony. It was a cascade of perfectly modulated integers that to an unaugmented ear would sound like soft surf on a beach, but to the superior Mechanicus aural implant became a harmonious interaction of perfect numbers, helicoidal patterns and waveform sounds that were as beautiful as they were artificial.
Holographic projectors displayed the system’s twelve worlds in floating veils of light, together with fleet deployment and the ongoing data inloads from the Speranza’s forward auspex arrays. The projectors encoded each of the system’s worlds with differing colours representing the various atmospheric, geological and climatological systems at work.
At the astrogation plotters, Azuramagelli co-ordinated the manoeuvres of the Kotov fleet to bring the Speranza into a declining orbital track in a way that maximised its defensive posture without appearing to be overtly hostile. Every ship was pulled into close formation, with the fleet’s three remaining warships tucked in close-defence positions. Moonchild and Wrathchild hugged the Speranza’s flanks, while Mortis Voss trailed in the tail gunner position. The rest of the Kotov fleet, fuel tenders, supply ships and refinery craft, were spread over its upper sections, ready to cluster in for defence at the first sign of trouble.
Vitali Tychon worked alongside Azuramagelli, and though his daughter had shown up an error in the Master of Astrogation’s calculations upon their first meeting, he had expressed his deep regret at Mistress Tychon’s wounding.
Across from Azuramagelli and Vitali, Kryptaestrex continued to oversee the ongoing ship-wide repair works from his Manifold link to Magos Turentek’s prow forges. Despite Kotov’s deep mistrust regarding the concessions he had been forced to make to Abrehem Locke, Kryptaestrex
was reporting that the new working dynamic between the Mechanicus and its bondsmen was already paying dividends in terms of productivity and efficiency.
Magos Blaylock moved amongst the magi and servitors like an anxious scholar at proficiency examinations, assessing their work, offering suggestions on superior analytical technique or refining aspects of their binary. Kotov watched his Fabricatus Locum at work, seeing something more than simple devotion to duty in his observations.
Putting aside Blaylock’s curious behaviour, Kotov turned his attention to the world occupying the central position in the viewing bay. Telok’s forge world was bathed in a purple haze of borealis, beautiful in a way that only devotees of the Machine could truly appreciate. The shimmering corona was a by-product of inhumanly massive energy generation on a planetary scale. Kotov had seen such hazes around forge worlds before, but never on so bright and consistent a level. The quantity of energy being generated was enough to empower the manufactories of at least six Exactis Prima-level production hubs.
The planet was roughly double the Martian mass and boasted an atmosphere capable of being processed by human lungs. Its geology was unknown, as was anything else of its surface conditions. Initial surveys had proved maddeningly inconclusive, with each sweep of the auspex revealing contradictory data-streams that on one pass revealed a planet undergoing traditional – if somewhat accelerated – ageing, while on another echoed Vitali Tychon’s data from Hypatia, which appeared to indicate signs of geological regression. Yet, as impossible as such readings appeared to be, Kotov had almost become used to encountering the inexplicable. After all, had not the Breath of the Gods remade Arcturus Ultra and transformed it from a dead system into one that would eventually prove to be habitable?
The collateral effects of such dizzyingly complex stellar engineering were a mystery, and the space in which such an event had occurred was bound to throw up anomalies for centuries to come. Yet for all that his mind was just about able to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of physically impossible spatial anomalies, Kotov couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something was, if not wrong, per se, at least not quite as right as he would like.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 73
