Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  He tried to speak, but his augmitter sub-systems – both binaric and hexamathic – were offline. His mouth opened, but only an exhalation of scorched air emerged, as though viral fires burned within his lungs.

  Hands gripped him and hauled him into what he assumed was an upright position. A sudden, vertiginous sense of dislocation assailed Blaylock as he became aware of three-dimensional space around him. His lower body pulsed through its gyroscopic diagnostics and quickly found his centre of balance. Bracing limbs slammed down and the rest of his body swiftly followed in a series of hard resets.

  Some portions of his internal system architecture still felt somehow wrong, but now was not the time for a shut-down and full diagnostic assessment. Sight returned. Slowly. Fearful of shocking him with what it might reveal.

  ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ he managed at last.

  Strong hands still gripped his robes, soaked through where his feeder pipes had torn loose. The canister at his back was angled strangely, leaking clouds of acrid vapours.

  He turned to thank the individual who had helped him to his feet, a magos in dark robes with silver eyes. His body was a crudely put together thing that somewhat resembled an arachnid.

  Galatea, Blaylock’s memory coils reminded him as they finished the purge of redundant data.

  With its identity recalled, so too was the dreadful fact of its existence. The lies it had told, the violations of every Mechanicus law it represented and the lives it had ended. Blaylock pulled away from its infectious touch as though burned.

  Almost every glittering entoptic veil burned with hissing, jumping static. Only the central display remained intact, though even it glitched and rolled with inloads of malicious code.

  ‘Magos Blaylock!’ shouted a boxy, robotic-looking thing that looked like it belonged in a loading dock rather than a starship’s bridge. ‘Are you rendered incapable?’

  Kryptaestrex, Master of Logistics.

  ‘No,’ said Blaylock, though he felt anything but capable.

  Another magos appeared beside Kryptaestrex. A latticework frame on robotic legs, within which an exploded diagram of a brain was held in suspension, spread between numerous linked plastek cubes.

  Azuramagelli, Master of Astrogation.

  ‘Magos Blaylock, you really need to see this,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘There is… something happening on the surface.’

  ‘Something?’ snapped Blaylock as yet more of his systems realigned after the attack on his augmetic nervous system. ‘Since when do adepts of Mars employ such vague phraseology? Coherence, precision and logic. Remember them. Use them.’

  ‘Apologies, Magos Blaylock,’ said Azuramagelli, gesturing to his station with a spindly manipulator arm. ‘I have not the terminology to accurately describe what I am seeing.’

  Blaylock moved as fast as he could towards Azuramagelli’s data hub, realising that he was perhaps not as fully realigned as he had thought when the deck of the Speranza seemed to lurch beneath him.

  He reached astrogation and pushed past Azuramagelli, carefully inloading the readings from the data hub, wary of any lingering fragments of malign code. He had been set to chastise Azuramagelli once again, but his admonishments went unsaid as he failed utterly to interpret the energy readings building to enormous levels on the planet’s surface.

  The data being gathered by the Speranza’s auguries was beyond anything Blaylock had ever seen. He had no idea what it might indicate, but the last vestiges of his human instincts of fight or flight screamed at him that this was dangerous.

  ‘Raise the voids, Kryptaestrex,’ he ordered. ‘Immediately.’

  ‘Magos, I have been trying to raise them for the last thirty seconds,’ said Kryptaestrex.

  ‘Trying?’

  ‘They will not light. My every command is being denied access to the rituals of ignition.’

  Blaylock all but ran to Kryptaestrex’s data hub. Bleeding veils of red filled the slates. His haptics were useless, burned out by the surge attack, and his noospherics were still resetting.

  But he could still issue commands manually.

  His fingers danced over the floating entoptic keyboard, ordering the Speranza to protect itself.

  But not even his exalted rank signifiers could reach the heart of the Ark Mechanicus. He was being kept out of his own ship’s core controls by some external force.

  The main display lit up with a flare of radiance building on the planet’s surface beneath the huge electrical storms. A continental-scale flare that blew out the atmospheric tempests it had taken the geoformers hours to becalm. The horrifying sight put Blaylock in mind of a stellar flare or a coronal mass ejection.

  ‘What is that?’ he said.

  ‘The Breath of the Gods,’ said Galatea with awed reverence.

  Moonchild was the first vessel to be hit.

  An arc of parabolic lightning rose from the surface of Exnihlio, passing through the tortured skies without apparent effort. Seen from space it appeared to expand at leisurely pace, but was in fact moving at close to four hundred kilometres per second.

  It wasn’t actually lightning – such atmospheric discharges could only exist within a planetary atmosphere – but it was the best description the Moonchild’s captain could articulate.

  His Master of Auspex shouted a warning, but the captain already knew the energised arc was moving too fast to avoid. Even with the Gothic’s shields partially lit, the tracery of light struck the ventral armour of the prow.

  Void-war was messy. It left vast clouds of debris and drifting hulks venting fuel and oxygen in their wake. It fouled space with squalling electromagnetics for decades and was rarely conclusive. The ranges at which most engagements were fought made it relatively easy for a vessel incapable of continuing a fight to go dark and slip away.

  There would be no slipping away from this fight.

  Moonchild exploded sequentially along its length. First the wedge of its bow vanished in a silent thunderclap of blue fire, then its midships, and finally its drive section in a searing plasmic fireball. It burned with blinding radiance for a few brief seconds as the oxygen trapped within its hull was consumed.

  The fires swiftly burned out, leaving Moonchild a charred skeleton of drifting wreckage. Lifeless. Inert. Ten thousand dead in the blink of an eye.

  Another pair of lightning arcs coiled up from Exnihlio.

  And Wrathchild and Mortis Voss joined Moonchild in death.

  More lightning flared towards the Speranza.

  Roboute hauled Pavelka’s robes, but he might just as well have been trying to pull a section of the tower itself. The Renard’s magos was rooted to the spot, her data-spikes locked into the control hub. Flickering data-light scrolled down the optics beneath her hood and her limbs jerked with involuntary twitches. She was fighting the hub’s code and, like an unbroken colt, it was fighting back.

  Angry blasts of electrical discharge coruscated along the length of her mechadendrites and into her body. Roboute was uncomfortably aware of the repulsively mouth-watering reek of cooking meat.

  ‘Ilanna! Disconnect!’ he shouted, alternating his attention between the furious clash of blades and claws at the head of the ramp and the snap of las-fire from Cadian rifles. ‘We have to go!’

  ‘Just. Keep. Them. Off me…’ hissed Pavelka.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ said Ven Anders, one hand holding his rifle, the other gripping the hilt of his power sword. ‘Get her free, Surcouf, or I’ll cut her loose myself.’

  Roboute nodded. He had no wish to remain here. He’d seen the thirsting, ribbed and fanged shapes of the monsters bounding up the ramp. The bulk of the Black Templars and the wraithlord kept him from seeing them any closer.

  A state of affairs he was keen to see continued.

  Bracha and Yael stood on the far side of the control hub, pumping shots into the enemy wh
enever a target presented itself.

  The Templar swordsmen were faring less well. Tanna was down on one knee. His left arm hung limp at his side, his pistol a molten wreck on the ground. Issur spasmed in the grip of a crackling electrical field that was burning him to death within his armour.

  Only Atticus Varda still fought unbowed.

  His black blade hacked into the silver armour of the Tindalosi, sending cloven shards of silver and bronze spinning in all directions. The Emperor’s Champion fought with the precision of a duellist and the power of a berserker, both war-forms distilled into a cohesive whole. It was quite the most extraordinarily disciplined feat of swordsmanship Roboute had ever seen.

  But even so sublime a warrior could not fight forever.

  ‘Ilanna, please,’ begged Roboute, risking a hand on her shoulder. He felt the furious micro-tremors of a body largely composed of machines working at full-tilt.

  The heat coming off her body was ferocious.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she barked. ‘Almost. There.’

  ‘Too late!’ shouted Ven Anders as two of the Tindalosi vaulted over the railings to the main floor of the gantry. One was punched from the air by a pair of three-round bursts from Yael and Bracha. The explosive impact of the mass-reactives blew the hellhound over the edge, and Roboute yelled in triumph as it fell with an ululating howl.

  That still left one, and the Cadians turned their hellguns upon it. Blazing streams of las-fire punched out with a speed and accuracy that only a lifetime’s worth of training could bring.

  Not a single shot hit the Tindalosi.

  A heartbeat later it was amongst them.

  Vodanus snapped a living body in two, tossing it aside and clawing another in half from shoulder to pelvis. This was more like it. This was the kind of foe it relished.

  Soft, mortal, fleshy and without any distracting code-scent that could break its geas. Its claws slashed and six bodies emptied of blood. Its hide whipped electricity. It burned, cut and melted its foes. Venomous oils secreted from its hooks left the meat screaming on their bellies.

  Some were tough and sinewy, others light as air.

  Different species?

  It made no difference, both were just as fragile.

  Energy beams stabbed it. Minor irritations. Its armour was proof against such primitive low-emission weapons. Crackling arcs of strange storm-lights struck it, psychic body blows of doom-seeking power. Ancient null-circuitry worked into its body dissipated these attacks harmlessly.

  Did these meat-things know nothing of Vodanus?

  Green-armoured warriors danced around it, darting in to bite it with crackling mouth-parts and slash with buzzing blades. It fired electromagnetic micro-pulses that exploded their internal organs.

  It heard screams from these ones, terrified screams that didn’t come from any vocal organs. It filed the information away for later perusal. No species it had thus far slain evinced such behaviour upon its death.

  Its jaws snapped on a mortal’s head, wrenching the body from side to side and letting the serrations of its teeth do the rest. The fast meat-things kept coming at it, unaware yet that they could not kill Vodanus. Their weapons sparked against its armour, vespid stings against a leviathan.

  Two of the black-armoured warriors rounded upon Vodanus – Space Marines, Telok’s data had called them – together with a slender warrior armed with a screaming-toothed sword. The weapon was clearly too large for her to wield, but Vodanus recognised that she too was a lethal huntress.

  These Space Marines were tougher and more deadly than anything its long-forgotten masters had wished dead. Each was encased in toxic armour of machine-spirits that could kill a hellhound with one wrong-placed bite or the temptation to feast. Vodanus did not fear these killers, but knew to be wary of them.

  Its prey was within sight, escaping along an outflung bridge of mesh steel and wire. Still within its grasp, but the first rule of any hunt was to leave none alive who might hunt the hunter.

  A pair of thundering impacts slowed its charge as the Space Marine warriors fired their heavy guns. Vodanus twisted into the air, killing another of the soul-screaming meat-sacks with a flick of its hooked back leg. Explosive ammunition followed it down, caroming from the curved plates of its shoulder as it landed in front of the three warriors that mattered.

  It howled in fury, but they didn’t run, which made them unique.

  Everyone ran from Vodanus.

  But, Vodanus reminded itself, these things did not know it.

  Another blast of explosive rounds hammered its armour.

  One detonated within its chest, and the momentary pain staggered it. Vodanus had not known pain of this kind in millennia. The pain of isolation and madness, yes. The knowledge that its existence was fragmenting moment by moment, certainly.

  But the pain of being wounded?

  That stirred old memories, old hurts and old joys.

  The power Telok had imbued it with from the ancient machine began its hateful work, cannibalising mineral reservoirs within its body to re-knit the damage, undo its hurt.

  It sprang forwards, faster than they could avoid. One clawed arm rammed into the chest of a Space Marine with all the force Vodanus could muster. Black and white became saturated with red. So bright, so vivid. So much.

  Vodanus clawed the body into the air and bit it in half.

  It spat the crumpled debris of meat and metal from its mouth.

  The huntress vaulted into the air as the second warrior ducked a hooked sweep of its arm. She spun the enormous blade as though it weighed nothing at all and clove it through a section of Vodanus’s spine. The Space Marine rammed his own toothed sword into the renewing sections of Vodanus’s body.

  Once again, Vodanus knew pain, but this pain was welcome. It had been too long since it had faced any foe capable of hurting it. Its body rolled in mid-air and Vodanus rammed a bladed foot into the huntress’s chest.

  She screamed and crumpled, almost broken in two, her sword skidding across the gantry. Vodanus bellowed with howling laughter as it hooked a claw through the armour of the Space Marine and tossed him aside like offal. He slammed into the high column of the control hub, crashing back down with his armour cracked and the ivory wings on his chest shattered into a thousand fragments. Bleeding code vapour streamed from the broken pieces of black metal, but Vodanus ignored the sweet scent.

  To taste it would be to die.

  Instead, it turned towards a last handful of soft, meaty bodies that awaited murder. Most were code-free, bare flesh and fear, but one stood at the control hub, violently enmeshed with the ancient spirit at its heart.

  This one bled code, bad code. Her machine arms snapped clear of the hub, drawing into her body. She cried a warning to the others.

  Vodanus howled and relished the terror it tasted.

  It bunched its hooked legs beneath it.

  And the world exploded in screaming white fire.

  Roboute and Anders had their guns drawn, but the giant beast that had so easily slaughtered most of the eldar and Cadians collapsed. It howled in pain, limbs convulsing in lethal swipes that tore up the metal of the gantry.

  Even incapacitated it was lethal. To approach it was to die.

  From the cessation of sound at the top of the ramp, Roboute knew something similar had happened to the Tindalosi facing Tanna’s swordsmen and the wraithlord. His analytical mind flashed through a lightning-swift assay of their current situation.

  Bracha was dead, no question of that, but Yael was already picking himself up with a groan of pain.

  Roboute felt his mouth go dry. The very idea of a Space Marine experiencing pain was something he’d never expected to see. Every devotional pict spoke of the Adeptus Astartes’ invincibility, their utter inability to feel pain or know fear. Roboute was realist enough to know that picts like that pedalled what
the Imperium wanted its people to believe, but even he was shocked by the volume of blood leaving Yael’s body.

  Ariganna Icefang limped over to Bielanna, her armour torn all across her chest. Blood as bright as Yael’s ran from her helm’s eye-lenses like red tears. She’d been hurt badly. Maybe even mortally. She said something to Bielanna, but her dialect made the words unintelligible. Bielanna shook her head. Whatever the exarch was asking of her, the farseer could not deliver.

  Roboute turned from the eldar as Pavelka slumped to her knees. Heat sinks worked into her rib-structure billowed the fabric of her robes with scorching vapours. She held a hand out to Roboute, feeling the air like a blind man. He took it, grimacing at the pain of her metal grip.

  ‘What did you do, Ilanna?’

  ‘Ask her later!’ yelled Anders, slinging his rifle and helping Roboute get the stricken magos to her feet. If Anders was pained by the searing heat of Pavelka’s body, he gave no sign.

  Between them, they hauled her away from the control hub, trying not to step on any of the hacked-apart limbs and bodies the hunting machine had left in its wake.

  The speed with which it had killed was phenomenal.

  How many were dead?

  Eldar and human bodies lay intertwined, making it impossible to tell. Tanna, Varda and Issur ran over, together with the few surviving Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees.

  ‘Was that you?’ Tanna asked Pavelka.

  She nodded. ‘I tricked the hub into accepting a self-replicating piece of damaged code into every machine within this tower. Its viral form angered the spirits within them, and they explosively purged it into the noosphere. Invisible to you, but painfully blinding to anything that uses augmetic senses.’

  Roboute glanced beneath Pavelka’s hood, seeing her ocular implants were dull and blank where normally they shone with pale blue illumination. Thin tendrils of smoke curled from the scorched rims.

  ‘No, Ilanna… Are you…?’

  ‘It needed to be done,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go!’

  Wrathchild, Mortis Voss and Moonchild were lifeless wrecks, blackened and lit from within by sporadic flashes of dying machinery. The lightning that struck the Speranza came straight from the heart of Exnihlio and phased through the hull of the Ark Mechanicus without apparent effort. Existing on an entirely different phasic state of existence to that which had obliterated the Speranza’s escorts, it destroyed nothing until it reached its point of focus.