The sickness faded, replaced with a hot, dull ache in the heart of Abrehem’s brain.
‘Coyne?’ he said. ‘Am I dead?’
‘No,’ snapped Chiron Manubia, looming into his field of view, ‘but you gave it your best shot, you bloody idiot!’
Abrehem took her rebuke at face value. But her tears spoke of genuine concern. Manubia wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and turned to address someone out of sight.
‘You see? I told you he wasn’t ready for this,’ she said, ‘no matter what your daughter says.’
‘He has to be,’ said Vitali Tychon, helping Coyne lift Abrehem to his feet. His legs were unsteady. His brain had momentarily forgotten how to use them.
‘Magos Tychon,’ said Abrehem. ‘I’m sorry…’
‘Didn’t we tell you not to fly too close to the datacores?’ said Vitali as they lowered him to one of the nave’s hard wooden benches. The shaven-headed adepts moved to give him room. ‘Galatea is tapped into all the vital systems.’
‘Galatea!’ cried Abrehem as the recollection of what he had experienced within the Speranza’s datascape rammed into the forefront of his memory. ‘It knows, oh no… It knows we’re here.’
‘You told it where we are?’ said Manubia.
‘I tried not to, but it was too strong,’ said Abrehem.
‘Did you tell it anything else?’ snapped Manubia. ‘Access codes, immolation sequences? Kill-codes? You know, the trivial stuff?’
Abrehem shook his head. The motion set off hammerblows within his skull. His vision greyed. He wanted to retort, but she was right.
‘That’s it, we’re dead,’ said Manubia, throwing up her hands.
‘No,’ said Vitali, tapping the side of his head. ‘Think. Galatea’s hold over the Speranza’s systems is so thorough that if it simply wanted to kill us, we would already be burning or asphyxiating.’
‘So why aren’t we?’ asked Hawke from across the nave. ‘I am so leaving if you think that’s a possibility.’
‘Because,’ said Vitali. ‘I think Galatea is going to want to take Master Locke from us alive.’
Abrehem got to his feet, still unsteady after his brush with Galatea in the datascape. Yet, for all that he had come close to irrevocable brain-death, the encounter had galvanised him with the urge to fight back.
‘You should let Vitali’s kill-packs inside,’ he said to Adept Manubia as he flexed his metal fist and returned to the throne. ‘I’m going back in.’
‘Describe the creature,’ said Kotov.
‘Small, no larger than a child,’ said Roboute, letting the dusty remains of the firing mechanism fall from his palm. ‘Vaguely humanoid, but its limbs bent in ways that looked wrong somehow, like they could articulate in several different directions at once. I couldn’t see the body clearly, what with it being wrapped head to foot in rags, but there was something else, something that made it hard to look at for longer than a few moments. After a while you started thinking it was moving or somehow shifting when you weren’t looking.’
‘In a stasis field?’ scoffed Kotov. ‘Impossible.’
‘Clearly you’ve never been to the Temple of Correction,’ said Roboute, standing and wiping the dust from his trousers. ‘But anyway, it didn’t matter, no one wanted to buy the thing. It was impossible to prove its authenticity. For all anyone knew they might be buying a fake.’
Tanna shook his head in disgust. ‘How did they come by this body?’
‘Story was, the clan’s scav-crews found it in a deep cave system beneath an outlier world called Epsilon Garanto. Apparently there was a pretty vicious battle between an Imperial kill-team and a subterranean alien infestation. Bloody enough for there to be no survivors, so the scavvers swept up what they could and got out before any follow-on forces arrived.’
‘Did you purchase the creature?’ said Kotov.
‘If I had, do you think I’d tell you?’ said Roboute. ‘Anyone who owned such a thing would soon have the Inquisition sniffing around their interests. And if even half the stories the auctioneer-proxy told are true, they’re absurdly dangerous. Who needs that on their ship?’
‘Dangerous how?’ asked Tanna.
‘The hrud are said to be dimensionally volatile,’ answered Kotov, sweeping his gaze around the rotten interior of the cave with sudden disquiet. ‘Able to shift between the interstices of the universe in ways even the Mechanicus do not fully understand. Each alien is said to possess an entropic field that causes ultra-rapid decrepitude in its surroundings. I have studied reports of these creatures and their alleged powers, but never thought to see an entire warren of them for myself!’
‘So if that is a whole warren of the creatures, why are we still alive?’ said Tanna. ‘And why don’t they just shift away?’
Kotov pointed to the blazing arcs of energy leaping between the brass orbs and arcane machinery affixed to the roof of the cave.
‘I suspect the machinery above us prevents the hrud from simply displacing,’ said Kotov. ‘Though I do not know how.’
‘Telok has trapped the feith-mhor here with his machines of crystal and iron dust,’ said Bielanna, appearing without warning behind them.
Roboute turned towards the farseer and saw something incredible. An eldar that looked old. Bielanna’s skin was pallid, and thread-fine veins traced swirling patterns over her cheeks and forehead like elaborate tribal tattoos. Her right eye had entirely filled with blood.
‘Feith-mhor? The Shadows out of Time?’ he ventured.
Bielanna nodded. ‘He has shackled their powers to the Caoineag, this infernal engine of the Yngir.’
‘Yngir? I don’t know that one.’
‘And I shall not tell you its meaning,’ said Bielanna, her voice filled with hate for all humankind. ‘I could not see it until now… here, in the heart of it… the eye of the hurricane. The skein’s threads distort through the warped lens of this world. Telok’s machine steals from the future and past to rebuild the present, heedless of the damage it wreaks.’
Despite Bielanna’s fractured syntax, Roboute saw the light of understanding in Kotov’s eyes.
‘These creatures are acting as a temporal counterbalance to the space-time distortions caused by the Breath of the Gods!’ said the archmagos. ‘That is why every auspex reading of Katen Venia and Hypatia showed them to be simultaneously in the throes of violent birth and geological inertia. Hyper-accelerated development balanced out by ultra-rapid decrepitude. Ave Deus Mechanicus!’
‘Speak plainly, archmagos,’ said Tanna. ‘I am not stupid, but I have not access to the knowledge you possess.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Kotov, trying hard to keep the excitement from his voice. ‘Space-time is being violated on a fundamental level. Put bluntly, Sergeant Tanna, Telok’s machine is undoing the basic laws of the universe in order to achieve miraculous results.’
Kotov paced the edge of the gorge, his head hazed with excess heat bleeding from his cranium as his cognitive processes spun up to concurrently access tens of thousands of inloaded databases.
‘If I am understanding… Bielanna correctly, the Breath of the Gods feeds its vast power demands by siphoning it from the future and the past, most likely from the hearts of dozens of stars simultaneously. It then uses that power to accomplish its incredible feats of stellar engineering,’ said Kotov, his mechadendrites tracing complex temporal equations in the air. ‘But the fallout from employing the machine created the many spatial anomalies Magos Tychon detected at the galactic edge, stars dying before their time, others failing to ignite and so forth. In all likelihood, the Breath of the Gods probably created the Halo Scar in the first place.’
Kotov stopped pacing and turned to the rest of their ragtag band. Roboute saw acceptance in his eyes, the superiority and arrogance he had come to know in the archmagos returned once again to the fore. The surety of purpose K
otov had lost in despair was restored in the set of his jawline and the cold steel in his eyes.
‘Master Surcouf, I owe you an apology,’ he said.
Roboute was taken aback. Of all the things he might have expected from Kotov, an apology wasn’t high on the list.
‘You do?’
‘Yes,’ said Kotov. ‘Because you were right. One larger problem is simply a series of more manageable problems. We have alerted Magos Blaylock to Telok’s perfidy, but it is not enough to warn others and expect them to fight our battles. We must take action to stop Telok. We have to stop the Breath of the Gods from ever leaving Exnihlio.’
‘So what’s our next move?’ said Roboute.
‘Simple,’ said Kotov. ‘We make our way back to the surface and kill Vettius Telok.’
Another arcing web of lightning crackled into existence aboard the Speranza, where granite priests of Mars whose deeds had long since been eclipsed flanked a dusty processional nave. Here stood a magos whose achievements Roboute Surcouf had once vowed to uncover, but never bothered to seek out.
The storm of lightning expanded at a geometric rate.
Forking tongues of corposant leapt from statue to statue and detonated each one with a thunderous crack of splitting stone and shearing rebars.
Last to be destroyed was the statue of Magos Vahihva of Pharses, who exploded in a bellowing fury of rock and fire. The swirling lightstorm seethed and raged around the vault of pulverised statuary, dragging their fragmented matter into the coalescing mass of a crystalline warrior-construct.
The attackers manifesting throughout the Speranza were little more than inert crystal, their latticework structure threaded with billions of tiny bio-imitative machines that gave them motion.
Equipped with limited autonomy by superlative rites of cortex evokatus developed by Archmagos Telok after his abortive expedition to Naogeddon, they manifested a cognitive awareness of their surroundings and behaviour that had all the appearance of being inventively reactive.
They were in fact bound by strict protocols of engagement and limited in intelligence by the number of micro-machines in each manifestation.
But what was manifesting in the processional nave was something else entirely. Within a raging supernova of white-green energy, a crystalline giant took shape. Fashioned and empowered by the critical mass of Telok’s machines aboard the Speranza, it was a macrocosm of synaptic connections far in advance of even the largest life form.
Each connection was useless in and of itself, but capable of combining the networked potential of every single crystalith into something greater than the sum of its many parts.
Taller than a Dreadnought, its crystalline limbs were hooked and tined, rippling with biomorphic induction energy. Its body was constantly in motion, cracking and reshaping as each new form was tested for lethality. Sometimes brutish and ogre-like, sometimes quadrupedal like a glass centaur. Other times it became a multi-limbed horror in the form of a clawed scorpinoid.
A host of guardian beasts surrounded it, bulky constructs of crystal with mantis-like blade limbs, glassy shields and angular skulls like vulpine hunters.
The alpha-creature’s newly awakened consciousness spread throughout the crystaliths aboard the Speranza like a wireless plague. It connected to the thousands of warrior-constructs and took away their autonomy.
And the apparently undirected nature of the attackers changed instantly to something singularly directed and driven by ferocious intent.
The Secutor temple squatted in the Speranza’s midships. Monolithic and threatening, it was the fiefdom of Magos Dahan. Its frontage was a weapon-studded cliff of glossy black stone cut from the bedrock of Tallarn, its only visible entrance a towering gate of black adamantium.
An enormous fanged skull variant of the Icon Mechanicus normally kept the gate sealed, but not today.
Mechanicus war engines rolled from the gate, spider-legged flame-tanks, praetorian phase-field guns, quad-cannons on armoured tracks and Rhino variants with turret-mounted graviton cannons. Following them came the clan-companies, augmented cybernetic warriors with baroque armour and technological variants of feral weapons.
The skitarii cohorts rolled from the gate to a central hub chamber below the temple. War-logisters with hook-bladed banners directed the warrior packs to radial transits that offered swift deployment throughout the ship. Braying skitarii warhorns and raucous war cries shook the walls as they clambered aboard their transports.
At the heart of the temple was the command vault, a cavernous bunker filled with banks of clattering logic engines at which sat hundreds of calculus-logi, strategos and members of the Analyticae. Ticker-tape machines spat punch-cards of orders and contact reports. Binaric chants relayed multi-layered vox and catechisms of praise in equal measure. Noospheric veils steamed from the ground. Servo-skulls flitted through the veils of light, recording, bearing messages or dispensing cryptic quotes from the Omnissiah in an aspect of the Destroyer.
Like a spider at the centre of its web, Magos Hirimau Dahan drank in the volumes of information, let it fill him. His body was a true hybrid of flesh and machine, weaponry and combat actuators. Dahan was a bio-mechanical engine geared for one purpose and one purpose only.
Killing.
And right now, his every faculty was engaged in the killing of the crystalline invaders of the Speranza. Thousands of boarding actions cycled through Dahan’s awareness, the particulars of each combat parsed and either discarded or added to the growing database of likely outcomes.
He processed engagements large and small – mass assaults on capital ships, desperate counter-boardings of mid-displacement cruisers, grappling actions of burning gunboats. The free-associative portions of his inloaded combat-memes were replete with notable boarding actions that offered the closest correlations with the current action.
Assault on the Circe by warriors alleged to be World Eaters.
Capture of the Dovenius Spear by the Ultramarines First Company.
Destruction of the Ophidium Gulf by the Dark Angels.
His battle-management wetware was currently processing two hundred and twenty-six separate engagements throughout the ship, each existing in a discrete compartment of thought within his neuromatrix. Everything from running firefights in cramped and darkened corridors to clashes between enormous crystalline hosts and skitarii cohorts through statue-lined processionals. Enemy war machines and Mechanicus heavy ordnance clashed in echoing maintenance hangars.
The fight for the Speranza would not be ended in a single glorious and decisive battle – what war ever really was? – it would be won or lost by incremental victories or defeats.
A holographic map shimmered in the air before him. Spectral grid lines rotated as Dahan’s upper manipulator arms spun them to display the relevant sections of the Speranza’s topography. Cadian positions were marked in blue, Mechanicus in gold and known hostile forces in red.
Dahan saw them all.
The enemy’s ability to appear without warning throughout the ship was Dahan’s biggest problem. Boarders constrained to fixed or predictable entry points could easily be contained and destroyed.
Boarders appearing at random were not so easily corralled.
The lack of cohesion was proving to be a bane as much as a boon.
It allowed no definitive plan to be formed. Instead, Dahan’s defence was relying on reactive deployments and rapidly mobile forces stationed at crucial nexus points.
Dahan shook his head. This was no way to fight. Too random, too unknown. His sub-cortical pattern recognition mechanisms were unable to attach any predictability to the attack. Dahan was left to make numerous command decisions in total ignorance of the enemy’s intentions or movements.
Was this how mortals fought?
No wonder the battles of the Imperial Guard were such bloodbaths. Fighting to such an inefficient model of wa
r, it was hardly surprising the rate of attrition within Imperial regiments was so high. Though, to be fair, the Cadians aboard the Speranza were maintaining a high ratio of combat kills to casualties.
Information came from all across the ship in pulsed bursts of rapid-fire data. Dahan answered them just as swiftly.
+Intruders detected, sub-deck 77-Rho, Section Occident++
+Clan Belladonna report 73 per cent losses. Combat ineffective in four minutes++
+Cadian positions Alpha-44 through Alpha-48 withdrawing to Axis Gamma-33++
Something in the nature of that withdrawal triggered a response in Dahan’s pattern recognition matrix and he spun out of the closed-in view on the holographic to a larger scale view.
The reason for the Cadian redeployment was easy to see.
A fresh batch of invaders had manifested on their flanks and was moving to cut off their supporting companies and line of retreat. Other enemy forces shifted their focus, suddenly breaking off engagements, initiating others or realigning their vectors of attack.
Like a missing piece of a puzzle, this fresh batch of invaders instantly brought terrible focus to the enemy attack.
‘Finally, you have your cohesion,’ said Dahan, recognising the appearance of a higher command authority within the enemy ranks and finding that he had been anticipating this moment.
It took him less than a picosecond to see the new objective of the enemy forces and realise that Captain Hawkins had been correct.
Enemy forces were perfectly poised to take the training deck.
And from there, the bridge.
Roboute slumped onto his haunches, fighting to draw air into his lungs. He rubbed the heels of his palms down his thighs while stretching his calves out in front of him. He had no idea how far they’d climbed, but was already resigning himself to the fact there was still a long way to the surface.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 97
