Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  The entire surface was a coruscating, reticulated grid of lightning that spat from raised copper orbs as large as kroot warspheres and arced from conical towers fringed with hundred-metre spines. Streamers of light flowed through the gnarled mass of enormous structures, as though the planet were an organism with illumination for blood. Warm rain streaked the canopy as Tanna brought the gunship down, following a newly appeared graphic of approach markers on the avionics slate. The margin for error was minimal, and Tanna realised his earlier suspicion that there existed an easier way to reach the surface was incorrect.

  He gestured to vast, funnel-shaped towers rearing up to either side of their flight path like guide poles on a snow-locked runway. Each was topped with a flanged maw that drew in great lungfuls of the clouds and vapour banks.

  ‘Are those atmospheric processors?’ he asked.

  Kotov could barely tear his gaze from the magnificent spectacle of the colossal, planet-wide city of industry and the inhumanly vast structures passing on either side, but he nodded curtly.

  ‘Yes, I believe they are,’ he said. ‘They have the hallmark of early STC universal assemblers and are probably what makes the air breathable. What of them?’

  ‘Those towers are creating a stable corridor of calmer air for the gunship to fly through.’

  ‘Again I ask, what is your point?’

  ‘That this route was specifically created for us,’ said Tanna. ‘Right now, this is the only way anyone is getting to the surface.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘If those machines are switched off, we will have no way to get off this planet.’

  The Barisan set down in the rain on a landing platform of elevated stonework in the centre of an open plaza that resembled the civic square of an Imperial city. Steel and glasswork spires pierced the sky on every side, but dominating the eastern side of the plaza was a colossal hangar-structure with a vaulted silver-steel roof and glittering masts at its four corners. The sky was a painfully artificial shade of blue, striated with bands of deeper azure and pale streaks of cyan.

  Lightning coursed up the sides of every structure, as though their only purpose was to create and channel energy, making the air taste like biting down hard on a copper rod. Kotov marched down the Thunderhawk’s frontal assault ramp with a gaggle of scrivener savants in his wake. A pair of servo-skulls with iron-cog halos drifted in lazy orbits above him. His body was a part organic, part cybernetic hybrid in the fashion of an ancient order of theologic warriors from a now lost peninsula of Terra, with a flowing crimson robe whose every fibre was a fractal-formed binary equation.

  He had come armed, as was his right as an archmagos, with the same gold-chased pistol with which he had fought Galatea’s abominations aboard the Valette Manifold station. The volkite weapon was a relic of the deepest past, an artefact so precious it truly belonged in a stasis-sealed treasury case in one of the great Halls of Wonders within the Dao Vallis repositories. Two menials hastily robed in Mechanicus finery carried the remains of the Tomioka’s distress beacon taken from its saviour pod upon satin cushions, a symbolic gesture of the path that had led them to this place.

  As befitting an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, he had come with an escort; eight skitarii in their black and gold armour bedecked with poisonous reptiles of Old Earth. Ven Anders had chosen a squad of his elite veterans, and Sergeant Tanna had come with his Space Marines. As the man who had brought him the locator beacon, Roboute Surcouf had, of course, been accorded a place in the landing party. He had brought young bodyguard and his ship’s magos, Pavelka, with him. Kotov read the censure brands in her noospheric aura with a note of vague curiosity. Surcouf was not the only one of the Renard’s crew to have flaunted authority, it seemed.

  Kotov stepped from the ramp, setting foot on a forge world that had not known the tread of a representative of the Imperium of Man in thousands of years. He marched to the edge of the stone platform, where a set of wide steps led down to the plaza, and surveyed his surroundings for any sign of Archmagos Telok or his agents.

  Kotov was not so vain as to have expected a triumphal welcome or a mass turnout of whatever workforce laboured in the power plants and forges of this world, but he had expected something. They had crossed the galaxy, endured all manner of hardships and indignities and suffered great loss to reach this world. A flicker of perturbation danced at the edge of his thoughts at the emptiness surrounding the Barisan.

  His skitarii took up position to his right, while Colonel Anders formed the Cadians up in two ranks on the left. Tanna and his Space Marines stood like giants carved from basalt and ivory at the base of the assault ramp; Surcouf and his people joined him at the steps, while the menial took a subservient position on his right. Kotov carried a long sceptre of gold and bronze, topped with a jet and bone representation of the Icon Mechanicus. Trails of incense pleasing to the Omnissiah wafted from its coal-red eye sockets.

  Putting aside the lack of any discernible form of greeting, Kotov instead turned his attention to the world itself, feeling the perpetual vibration in its bedrock that was common to planets entirely given over to the workings of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  But there was more to it than that.

  Kotov felt the unmistakable presence of grand designs, of new and unimagined workings taking place here. Deep in the very essence of what made him an archmagos, he sensed that magnificent things were afoot on this world. Technologies as yet undreamed, research that had stagnated millennia ago and which was now resurgent, developments in arenas of sophistication that the magi of Mars could not even begin to imagine.

  This was a world that was in the purest sense of the word, unique.

  And it was empty.

  Sergeant Tanna and Colonel Anders approached and stood to either side of him.

  ‘Were we not expected?’ asked Anders, clad in his dress uniform, regalia that only a Cadian would recognise as being any different from battledress.

  ‘We are expected, of course,’ replied Kotov, fighting down a mounting sense of unease. ‘We received detailed instructions for our landing.’

  ‘From an automated source,’ pointed out Surcouf. ‘That could be hundreds of years old or more.’

  ‘No,’ said Kotov. ‘Had that been the case, the given waypoints would not have delivered us to the surface, but seen us torn apart in the geomagnetic storms on our descent. The co-ordinates we were given are only relevant at this precise moment.’

  ‘Then where is Telok?’ demanded Tanna.

  ‘He will be here,’ said Kotov. ‘The authentic catechisms of first communion were exchanged with the binaric purity of genuine Mechanicus signifiers. We are expected and we will be met.’

  ‘I think you might be right,’ said Surcouf as previously invisible seams appeared in the facade of the enormous hangar-structure with the vaulted silver-steel roof. A titanic gateway was revealed, like one of the portals offering access to the vaults of arcana beneath Olympus Mons, and from it marched a glittering behemoth.

  Easily the equal of an Imperator Titan in height, but as wide and long as the largest Mechanicus bulk lander, it was an impossibly huge scorpion-like creature of glass and crystal. Its segmented body was veined with shimmering lines of emerald light and low-slung between enormous legs like frozen stalactites hewn from the roof of a colossal cave. It moved with the sound of breaking glass and grinding stone, and no one could miss the similarity to the bio-mimetic crystal-forms they had fought on Katen Venia.

  ‘Throne preserve us,’ breathed Tanna.

  ‘What in the name of Terra is that?’ hissed Anders.

  Kotov fought to hold back his own fear, but the sight of so monstrous a creation circumvented his rational neural pathways. Nothing could stand against such a towering war-engine, not the might of the Imperial Guard, not a Titan Legion, nor even the awesomely destructive war-engines of the Centurio Ordinatus. This was death in frozen, c
rystalline form.

  ‘Now that can’t be good…’ said Surcouf, backing away towards the Barisan.

  ‘We have been brought here to die,’ said Tanna.

  ‘No,’ said Kotov, though the evidence was hard to deny. ‘That makes no sense.’

  ‘Believe what you want, archmagos, but we are leaving!’

  ‘Is it even possible to get back?’ cried Anders over the clashing din of the crystalline beast’s stamping, seismic approach.

  ‘It has to be,’ said Tanna. ‘We reverse our course to the surface and hope the stable corridor through the atmosphere is still open.’

  ‘You’re staking our lives on a forlorn hope,’ said Anders.

  ‘Better a forlorn hope than no hope,’ pointed out Tanna.

  ‘True enough,’ nodded Anders, waving his own men back to the gunship.

  Kotov alone did not move, nor did his skitarii or his aides. He watched the approach of the crystal leviathan with transfixed awe.

  Tanna shouted at him to get to the Barisan, but Kotov ignored him.

  Better death than to return in disgrace.

  Though he had helped Kotov reach this world, Vitali Tychon had declined the chance to accompany the archmagos to the surface. It had been hard enough to leave his daughter under the care of the medicae staff for the time it took to begin the cartographae protocols on approach to Telok’s forge world.

  What if she were to wake while he was away?

  With his work complete on the command bridge, Vitali had ridden the mag-lev to the medicae deck and now hurried towards the burns unit. The attending surgical adepts were quietly confident that Linya would survive and recover much of her former operational utility. Her legs had been amputated at mid-thigh, but augmetic replacements had already been fashioned by Magos Turentek that closely mimicked the appearance of human limbs.

  The rest of the damage had been largely cosmetic, and the vat-grown skin patches were showing signs of renewed growth. It would never be the same as human skin, but it was as close as could be created without a clone donor – and Linya had always been adamant that she could never allow another life to be brought into being simply to act as a repository for spare organs.

  The corridors of the medicae deck were deserted, which was unusual, but with the ship in orbit around Telok’s forge world, Vitali was not entirely surprised. How often did an adept of Mars get to travel beyond the edges of the galaxy, let alone witness a forge world established in the depths of intergalactic space?

  He hoped Linya would be awake. He wanted to speak to his daughter again, to hold her hand now that she was no longer at risk from infection and the counterseptic field was no longer required. He had no doubt that she would have insights into the nature of this world that had escaped the more traditionally minded magi.

  Besides, he could use the help in cataloguing the many anomalous readings he was detecting from the world below. Much like Hypatia, Telok’s forge world exhibited signs of aberrant senescence, appearing to experience periods of hyper-accelerated ageing balanced out by concomitant periods of renewal. Geological push and pull were all part and parcel of a planet’s existence as its orbit traced an elliptical path around its star, but this was something more, something unexplained and, for now, beyond his ability to fathom.

  Too many inexplicable anomalies that shared this same characteristic were mounting up for Vitali’s liking: the reports of the robotic guardians on the Tomioka being in a state of decrepitude but yet still functional; the apparent planetary youth of Hypatia and the presence of a pre-Age of Strife metropolis; and now these nonsensical readings.

  Whatever Telok had found in the wilderness space, it had effectively unravelled the fabric of space-time and made a mockery of the physical laws governing its operation. Vitali’s thinking was too literal and methodical to make sense of such things; he needed Linya’s ability to think in curves to galvanise their cogitations.

  Vitali turned into the burns unit and followed the familiar route through its sterile corridors, still turning over the problems of trans-dimensional fractures in space-time and their collateral effects on universal chronometry.

  So focused was Vitali on this largely theoretical and largely unknown branch of Mechanicus art that at first he didn’t notice the bodies.

  He stopped in his tracks and all thoughts of quantum theorems were forgotten.

  The central hub chamber of the burns unit resembled an uprising in a slaughterhouse.

  Corpses and severed limbs lay scattered throughout the space like offal, too many and in too much disarray to even begin to guess at how many dead bodies surrounded him. Horrified, Vitali saw one body cut in half at the waist, sitting in a lake of oil-sheened blood, another that was little more than a truncated slab of meat with metallic nubs of bone protruding from its torn flesh. Mechanical parts were strewn amongst the hacked up meat, and Vitali saw the robes of magi, servitors and menials.

  The carnage had been indiscriminate, the exalted murdered alongside the enslaved.

  Worse, there was clear relish taken in these killings, a savage joy in the reduction of human flesh and machine augmentation to ruin.

  Prudence and logic dictated a retreat, but his daughter lay defenceless in one of this deck’s treatment chambers. Whatever maniac had perpetrated this senseless massacre might still be here, might still have designs on killing anyone he came across.

  Vitali was no warrior and had always eschewed the implantation of weaponry within his body-plan, but right now he would have gladly had an integral beam weapon or energy sword. Stepping around the worst of the blood and discarded body parts, Vitali picked his way towards the passage that led to Linya’s room.

  Scarlet droplets had sprayed the walls here, as though the murderer had swung his killing blade to spatter the lifeblood of his victims in some perverse act of vandalism. With a sinking heart, Vitali hurriedly followed the looping arcs like a trail of horrid breadcrumbs.

  ‘No, please, no,’ whispered Vitali as he saw the blood drops traced an unerring course to Linya’s room. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, please no.’

  The door was ajar and Vitali heard sounds of movement from within.

  Though he had no ability to fight beyond what innate human nature had gifted him, Vitali didn’t hesitate and barged through the door.

  ‘Get away from her!’ he shouted without knowing who or what lay within.

  The grisly tableau before him halted him in his tracks and he sank to his knees in abject horror.

  Galatea squatted at the side of Linya’s bed, the silver-eyed tech-priest body hunched over his daughter like some predatory vampire creature. Blood haloed Linya’s head and Galatea’s arachnid limbs were wet where it had hacked its victims apart in the medicae hub.

  ‘Magos Tychon,’ said Galatea. ‘We are glad you could be here.’

  The machine intelligence straightened up and Vitali recoiled in horror.

  ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus!’ wailed Vitali. ‘What have you done? Omnissiah have mercy, what have you done to my Linya?’

  ‘We said your daughter was exceptional,’ said Galatea, as a web of micro-fine connector cables wormed their way inside a glass cylinder of bio-conductive gel to infest the newly-implanted organ within. ‘And now her mind will be exceptional within our neuromatrix.’

  The crystalline leviathan moved with a hypnotic fluidity that should have been impossible for something so enormous. The sheer magnificence of its construction and very conception was astounding, beyond anything even the most crazed techno-heretics imprisoned beneath the Baphyras Catena dared to dream into existence.

  It appeared to have no moving parts as any Mechanicus enginseer would understand the notion, its joints and segmented body parts seeming to move within and through one another in ways his ocular implants told him ought to be impossible; as though the bonds between the crystalline lattices within its body were
fluid in ways no one had thought possible.

  Tanna shouted at him once more, but again he ignored the Space Marine’s words.

  What fate would there be for an archmagos who returned empty handed from an expedition that had suffered such loss? He would be stripped of his last holdings and reduced to his component parts to be reclaimed into servitor implants. How would that serve the Omnissiah?

  Better to die within sight of his goal than to flee towards disgrace.

  The aching blue of the sky and the lightning arcing between the giant tesla-coil towers glittered from its multi-faceted form. It had a beauty all its own, a lethal majesty that had a perfect symmetry of form that struck Kotov as being ostensibly similar to Galatea’s appearance. The comparison was a poor one; the hybrid machine intelligence’s mismatched body-plan was at best a crude approximation of this magnificent creature’s form.

  No. Not an approximation.

  A copy…

  Three figures appeared at his side and Kotov nodded to Sergeant Tanna, Colonel Anders and Roboute Surcouf.

  ‘You are not leaving?’ he asked.

  ‘I left Kul Gilad to die on the Adytum,’ said Tanna. ‘I will not leave you to die alone.’

  ‘I’ve come this far,’ said Surcouf. ‘Seems a shame to leave without seeing how it all ends.’

  Anders nodded in the direction of the leviathan as it loomed overhead, a titanic monster that could crush them underfoot without even noticing.

  ‘And even if we got into the air, that thing would swat us down in seconds,’ added Anders. ‘And I’m mechanised infantry through and through, I’d much rather die on the ground than in a burning wreck of a Thunderhawk. No offence to your flying skills, Tanna.’

  Kotov shook his head with an amused grin. ‘No-one is dying here today.’

  Anders looked set to disagree when the vast plaza was suddenly filled with the sound of splintering glass. Every one of the landing party craned their necks upwards as a million spiderwebbing cracks zigzagged over the surface of the towering scorpion creature. Its entire body began coming apart, as though it had been struck by a precisely resonant hammerblow at its most vulnerable point and its structure was revealed to be no more solid than grains of powdered glass.