Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  The first blast coalesced within the Speranza amidships on Deck 235/Chi-Rho 66, a high-ceilinged turbine chamber filled with rank upon rank of thundering engines that provided toxin-scrubbed air to a quadrant of ventral forge-temples.

  A tempest of blazing lightning arcs, white-hot and fluid, filled the central nave between the turbines. Ghost shapes moved within the light, hurricanes of microscopic machinery that had travelled the length of the faux-lightning from Exnihlio in seconds.

  The crackling bolt provided the energy, the particulate-rich air of the Speranza the raw material as solid forms began unfolding from the compressed molecules in which they had been carried.

  The deck’s servitors ignored the furious storm, oblivious to the threat manifesting among them. Those whose inculcated task routes carried them close to its wrath were instantly burned to cinders, their flesh and matter now fuel for the coalescing invasion.

  At first the Mechanicus adepts struggled to find fault with their systems, believing some ritual or catechism had been overlooked or an incorrect unguent applied. Alarm klaxons blared throughout the deck and alert chimes rang through adjacent forges and engine-temples. By the time Chi-Rho 66’s adepts realised this was no machine malfunction, it was already too late.

  The first crystaliths to emerge from the lightstorm were crude approximations of Adeptus Astartes. Glassy and smoothly finished, each was freshly wrought from the molten light and filled with thousands of Telok’s unique nano-machines. They marched in glittering ranks, hundreds strong, and filled Chi-Rho 66 with blasts of emerald fire. Machines exploded, servitors died, devastating chain reactions were begun.

  Binaric vox-blurts raced frantically to the bridge, warning of the boarders, but Chi-Rho 66’s warning would not be the last. Fresh arcs of lightning from the planet’s surface struck all across the Speranza, a dozen at a time, and each storm disgorged hundreds of crystaliths. Some were a basic warrior-caste, others were larger, formed with heavier weapons and bladed claws, and carried sheets of reflective armour like heavy, glassy mantlets.

  Last to form onto Chi-Rho 66 were the war machines.

  What Telok had once described as things of terror.

  Above the tower, the crackling fury in Exnihlio’s upper atmosphere had stilled. Tanna was struck by the pale clarity of the sky. It reminded him of the murals aboard the Eternal Crusader, the ones that depicted the pastoral idyll of Old Earth.

  That illusion was shattered the instant his eyes fell from the sky and saw the unending vistas of gargantuan generator towers and forge-complexes stretching to the horizon.

  The radial bridge that led from the tower opened up onto a tiered set of stairs enclosed within a chain-link cage. The wide gantry offered routes to higher levels or down into roiling banks of flame-lit exhaust gases venting from the tower’s base.

  A cable-stayed suspension bridge connected the universal assembler to a vast, boxy structure five hundred metres away. Clad in sheets of rusted corrugated sheet-steel, the building offered no clues as to its purpose beyond a number of smoke stacks that belched soot-dark smoke and rained a greasy, ashen snow over the roofs of lower buildings.

  It reminded Tanna of the giant, industrial-scale crematoria on worlds like Balhaut and Certus Minor.

  He hoped that wasn’t an omen.

  ‘Bracha?’ asked Varda.

  Tanna shook his head, and the Emperor’s Champion cursed.

  ‘Yael?’

  ‘Alive,’ said Tanna, pointing to the far side of the bridge where Yael covered his battle-brothers with his bolter. They ran to join him, with Uldanaish Ghostwalker limping behind them.

  The damage done to its legs had robbed the wraith-warrior of its speed and grace. Beside Yael, Kotov’s skitarii were hacking an entrance into the structure ahead through a shuttered door of concertinaed steel.

  Tanna glanced over his shoulder, searching for signs of pursuit.

  Issur saw him look and said, ‘You th-th-think the adept kill… killed them?’

  ‘Doubtful,’ replied Tanna. ‘I laid enough mortal wounds on those beasts that they should have been destroyed a dozen times over. If they can survive that, they will survive Magos Pavelka’s cantrip.’

  ‘Those beasts are tough,’ agreed Varda. ‘I only ever fought one foe that could survive the kill-strikes I favoured them with.’

  Tanna nodded. ‘Thanatos?’

  ‘Aye, the silver-skinned devils that kept coming back no matter how hard I hit them or how many mass-reactives took them apart.’

  ‘Is th-tha… that what these are?’ asked Issur.

  ‘No,’ said Uldanaish Ghostwalker, his voice no longer deep and resonant, but thin and distant. ‘These things are not servants of the Yngir, they were wrought by living hands and given the power to undo mortal wounds by Telok’s mad sorceries. But you are correct, they will be back.’

  As if to underscore the wraith-warrior’s words, the hounds burst from the tower. Some stood on their hind legs, others hunched over on all fours as they searched for their prey. Even a cursory glance told Tanna the damage he and his brothers had inflicted was entirely absent.

  The beasts saw them crossing the bridge and sprinted after them, bounding closer with howling appetite. Sparks flew from hooked claws on the mesh grille of the bridge deck.

  ‘Templars, stand to!’ shouted Tanna.

  ‘No,’ said Ghostwalker, standing athwart the bridge. The curved, bone-bladed sword snapped from its gauntlet. ‘This is where I will fight, as Toralven Gravesong did at Hellabore.’

  Tanna guessed what the giant warrior intended and said, ‘Tell me one thing, Ghostwalker. Did Toralven Gravesong live?’

  The wraithlord turned its emerald skull towards him, and Tanna saw through the awful wound torn there that the smooth gemstone within was cracked. Its light was fading.

  ‘Toralven Gravesong was a doom-seeker,’ said Ghostwalker.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That he had walked the wraith-path for more lifetimes than you or I will ever know,’ said Ghostwalker. ‘Perhaps too many.’

  Tanna understood. ‘On Armageddon, I met a warrior of the Blood Angels whose duty was to hear the final words of those whose death was upon them. It was his burden to end their suffering, but he spoke of the peace those lost souls sometimes knew when he told them that death had brought an end to their duty.’

  Tanna, Varda and Issur raised their swords in salute.

  ‘Die well, Ghostwalker,’ said Tanna.

  ‘Run,’ advised the wraith-warrior.

  Uldanaish turned from the withdrawing mon-keigh, soul-sick that their leader actually believed he understood the true depth of what was to be lost here.

  Hadn’t the human heard what Uldanaish said earlier?

  His body had died a long time ago, but devotion to the Swordwind had seen his spirit preserved within the ghost lattice of the wraithlord’s spirit stone. A spirit stone now split to its heart and releasing that which it kept hidden from an ancient and hungry god.

  This was the fear that lurked at the heart of the eldar race. From artist to exarch, the prospect of She Who Thirsts devouring and tormenting their spirit for all eternity filled even the stoutest heart with unreasoning horror. Who could ever have thought he would embrace such a fate for the mon-keigh?

  Uldanaish clung to his wounded wraith-body with every fibre of his determination. Already he could hear cruel laughter pressing in around him, the monstrous hunger of a dark power that would swallow his soul and not even notice.

  The Tindalosi were almost upon him as he took position at the exact centre of the bridge.

  A wraithlord did not see as mortals saw. Wraithsight perceived the world in half-glimpsed dreams and nightmares, each redolent with ghostly emotions and shimmering hues. Without a farseer’s guiding light, it was difficult to sort real from unreal.

  The eldar w
ere ghost forms, concealed from She Who Thirsts by their spirit stones, but each mon-keigh was a plume of blood-red radiance, a being with an unlimited capacity for violence.

  Bielanna was already within the building behind him, and Uldanaish felt a sudden fear at the prospect of his people entering that dread space. Something terrible lurked beneath it, something that reeked of unending pain and a world’s suffering.

  Uldanaish wanted to warn them of the danger, but the Tindalosi were upon him. Like the mon-keigh, they were radiant things, phosphor bright and feral in their lust for violence.

  That they were intelligent was beyond question.

  Uldanaish had felt their twisted malevolence as soon as they entered the tower. What lurked within them were artificial minds so monstrous, so psychotic, that it beggared belief any sentient race would risk creating them.

  It saw the leader beast immediately, a patchwork thing of evil and insatiable hunger that left blistered negative impressions on his wraithsight. Scratches of dark radiance flickered in the thing’s smoking eye-lenses, and its oversized jaw drooled lightning from bloodstained fangs.

  They came at Ghostwalker five abreast.

  He charged towards them with long, loping strides. He stabbed down, carving the first through the spine with his wraithblade. Sensing weakness, one went for his legs, another his skull. He cut the first almost in two with his gauntlet weapon. The second impaled itself on his blade. Another seized his gauntlet in its jaws and swung itself wide, using its mass to drag him with it.

  The last beast gripped the vanes flaring from his shoulders and wrenched in the opposite direction. Ghostwalker loosed a bray of ancient pain as the vanes shattered like porcelain. He brought his blade back, shearing the legs from the beast biting his other arm.

  With that arm free, he swung low from the hip and pummelled his fist into the monstrous hunter clawing his side apart. The impact buckled its midsection inwards, almost snapping it in two. It screeched a machine-like howl and landed hard on the parapet of the bridge. Uldanaish leaned back and kicked it over.

  The beast whose spine he had carved unfolded from its hurt, fresh plates already extruding from some internal void. Green lights danced over the new steel. Uldanaish sent a threading pulse of laser fire though its eyes. They blew out in a screaming howl of hostile static.

  Two of the beasts tried to push past him. He stepped back and kicked one in the ribs, almost flattening it against the iron-girder parapet. Uldanaish spun on his heel and pinned the other to the plated deck of the bridge with his wraithblade.

  The leader beast crashed into him. They rolled. Uldanaish’s fist slammed into its side. Its wide mouth snapped shut on his skull, ripping out plate-sized shards of wraithbone. His blade scored deep cuts in its spinal ridges. Its hooked limbs ripped into his chest and broke his armour into long strips of wraithbone.

  They broke apart. Uldanaish rolled to his feet and staggered as his right leg finally gave out. Psycho-active connective tissue ground like broken glass in the joint, and no amount of will could force it to bear his weight.

  The Tindalosi faced him; he a wounded giant, they mechanised assassins that renewed themselves with each passing second.

  Dragging himself back along the bridge deck on one knee, Uldanaish hauled himself upright. The spectral vista of his wraithsight was fading, yet the scratched outlines of the Tindalosi remained stark and black.

  The sound of cruel laughter was closer now, like one of the eldarith ynneas coming to savour its victim’s degradation.

  Now was the moment.

  ‘Come, hounds of Morai-Heg,’ he said. ‘We die together!’

  Uldanaish extended his left arm and cut through the thick suspension cables with a sawing blast of high-energy laser pulses. At the same instant, his wraithblade sliced up through the entwined knot of cables at his shoulder.

  The deck buckled as the bridge’s cardinal supports were removed at a stroke. The Tindalosi saw the danger and surged past him, but it was already too late.

  With a scream of tearing metal, the bridge snapped in two, spilling the combatants into the explosively toxic clouds venting from the base of the tower. The Tindalosi howled as they fell, their metal hides blistering in the caustic fog.

  Uldanaish Ghostwalker made no sound at all.

  His soul had already been claimed.

  The aura of abandonment Vitali felt looking at the cog-toothed entrance to Forge Elektrus reminded him of the plague-soaked sump-temples of the Schiaparelli Sorrow of Acidalia Planitia. The Gallery of Unremembering within Olympus Mons depicted that great repository in its heyday, a towering pyramid filled with data from the earliest days of mankind’s mastery of science.

  Martian legend told that the Warmaster himself had unleashed a fractal-plague known as the Death of Innocence, which obliterated twenty thousand years of learning and transformed an entire species-worth of knowledge into howling nonsense code.

  Vitali and Tarkis Blaylock had scoured some of the deepest memory-vaults for surviving fragments of that knowledge. The plague had evolved in the darkness for nearly ten millennia and all they found were corrupt machines, insane logic-engines and lethal scrapcode cybernetics haunting the molten datacores.

  This wasn’t quite on the same level, but being below the waterline on the Speranza while it was under attack gave Vitali the same sense of threat lurking around every corner.

  Judging by the invisible cocktail of combat-stimms surrounding him, the twenty skitarii he’d commandeered from one of Dahan’s reserve zones clearly felt the same way.

  Vitali had wanted a cohort of praetorians, but Dahan had point-blank refused, rank-signifiers be damned. After a heated binaric negotiation the Secutor had grudgingly released a demi-maniple to Vitali’s authority.

  Each skitarii was encased in archaic-looking shock-armour that put them only just below the height of a Space Marine. Draped in an assortment of ragged pennants and mechanical fetishes, their feral appearance put Vitali in mind of the legendary Thunder Warriors of Old Earth, whose faded images were preserved on a dusty block said to have once been part of the Annapurna Gate.

  Oversized gauntlets bore a mixture of blast-carbines, shotcannons or heavy electro-spears. A few had power weapons or rapid-firing solid slug throwers comparable to Adeptus Astartes bolters.

  They’d moved through the Speranza at speed; diverting to avoid columns of running soldiers, past the sounds of gunfire and explosions, along corridors scored with laser impacts and strewn with glassy debris.

  Traversing a suspended gantry arcing across a vaulted graving dock designed for Leviathans, Vitali had his first glimpse of the enemy. Crystalline warriors, identical to the ones he’d remotely seen aboard the Tomioka. Blitzing green bolts chased them over the gantry, but before any real weight of fire could be brought to bear, a flanking force of weaponised servitors emerged from opposing transverse through-ways. They punched through the enemy in a carefully orchestrated two-pronged attack. Vitali didn’t stay to watch the final annihilation of the invaders, pushing ever downwards towards his destination.

  The approach halls of Forge Elektrus were dark and unwelcoming, its spirits glitchy and wary of the intruders in their midst. Vitali sensed fresh reworking in the code of the machinery behind the walls, which surprised him in a place so obviously neglected.

  His jet-black servo-skull, an exact replica of his own cranial vault, floated beside him like a nervous child. A battle robot aboard the Tomioka had almost destroyed it, but Linya had brought it back and painstakingly restored it on the journey to Exnihlio.

  The skitarii hadn’t shared the skull’s caution, and deployed into the approach hall as though they were ready to storm Forge Elektrus. They took cover against projecting spars of the bulkhead and covered the cog-toothed door with their enormous guns. A weeping skull icon of the Mechanicus drizzled oil to the perforated deck. The vox implanted within its ja
ws buzzed and the lumens flickered in time with its hostile binaric growl.

  Vitali walked to the door and looked up at the skull.

  ‘My name is Magos Vitali Tychon, and I seek entry to Forge Elektrus,’ he said, pressing his hand to the locking plate and letting it read his rank signifiers. ‘I must see the senior magos within.’

  The skull spat a wad of distortion.

  ‘For an audience or a fight?’ it said. ‘I’m hearing reports about invaders on the ship, and that’s a lot of nasty-looking men you have there. Two suzerain-caste kill-packs if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘It’s quite a distance from the cartographae dome to Forge Elektrus,’ said Vitali. ‘And, as you say, the Speranza is under attack. I wanted to be sure I survived the journey.’

  ‘Given that you’re clearly mad to have even tried, tell me why I should let you in,’ said the skull.

  ‘Very well. I have reason to believe there is someone or something within this forge that can save the ship,’ said Vitali.

  The skull fell silent, hissing dead air for thirty seconds before the forge door rolled aside and a waft of incenses used in the anointing of freshly sanctified machines blew out. Vitali found himself facing a strikingly pretty adept, whose features so closely resembled Linya’s that it sent a blistering surge of high voltage around his system. Her robes were oil-stained crimson. Golden light haloed her. She held an adept’s staff crowned with laurels and snared mammals in one bronzed hand, a humming graviton pistol in the other.

  ‘Magos Chiron Manubia at your service,’ she said, and gestured within the forge with the barrel of her pistol. ‘You can enter, but the kill-packs stay outside.’