Kotov thought back to that moment, remembering the potential he had felt. The potential and the unease. And how he had smothered that unease with ambition and the need to believe in all that Telok represented.
The silver dome that once filled the plaza with its immensity was gone. In its place was a gaping chasm that dropped into the heart of Exnihlio. The Breath of the Gods was a smear of light in the sky, a new and dreadful star.
The plaza seemed empty without the silver dome, and the towering structures on all sides made Kotov feel like he was deep in a crater gouged in a vast glacier. After so long enclosed by the industry of Telok’s forge world, the echoing emptiness was unnerving. Gone was the omnipresent beat of machinery he associated with a forge world, the roar of furnaces and the electrical hum of a global infrastructure.
For all intents and purposes, Exnihlio was deserted.
Atticus Varda led them into the plaza, his Black Sword unsheathed. Tanna, Yael and Issur marched alongside their champion, while the Cadians and skitarii moved with Kotov. Roboute Surcouf and Magos Pavelka brought up the rear.
Telok was waiting for them.
The Lost Magos stood on a landing platform raised up from the plaza. His bulk was immense, hostile and insane. How could Kotov not have seen the lunacy at the heart of him?
Telok’s expression was one of pleasant surprise at the sight of them – though he must surely have known of their approach.
‘Can you hit him from here?’ Tanna asked Yael.
‘I can, brother-sergeant,’ confirmed Yael, chambering a stalker-round.
‘Do not waste your shot,’ said Pavelka. ‘Telok is protected by layered energy shields. I cannot see him, but I can feel the presence of void flare.’
‘Is she right?’ asked Tanna.
Kotov switched through his auto-senses and nodded.
‘It would take a macro-cannon to get to him,’ he said.
‘Archmagos Kotov,’ said Telok, his voice boosted and echoing from the buildings around them. ‘As irksome as you and your strange friends have become, I have to say I am pleased you yet live. History is in the making, and history must be observed to matter, otherwise what is the point? The Breath of the Gods draws near the Speranza and this world is spiralling to its doom. Have you any valediction?’
Kotov knew there was no point in trying to sway Telok from his course, but tried anyway.
‘It doesn’t work, Vettius,’ he said. ‘Your machine. It won’t work when you leave this place. Not without the hrud to counterbalance the temporal side-effects. But you know that already, don’t you?’
Telok grinned and it was the leer of a madman.
‘It only needs to work once,’ said Telok. ‘Then when Mars is mine and the Noctis Labyrinthus opens up to me I will have a new power source at its heart. I will have no need of filthy aliens.’
‘You would tear the galaxy apart for the sake of mortal ambition?’ asked Bielanna, her warriors spreading out around her.
‘Speaks the emissary of a race whose lusts destroyed their empire and birthed unimaginable horrors upon the galaxy,’ said Telok. ‘You are hardly best suited to speak of caution.’
‘I am the one most suited to speak of caution, I know the folly of what you attempt,’ said Bielanna. ‘Your machine was wrought for creatures who are anathema to life. Their servitor races built it to drain the life from stars and feed the monstrous appetites of their masters. It was never intended to be employed by a species with so linear a grasp of the temporal flow and with no sensory acuity to perceive deep time.’
‘And yet I now command the Breath of the Gods,’ snarled Telok.
Bielanna laughed. ‘Is that what you truly believe? That such a terrible creation would allow a mere mortal to be its master? Your capacity for self-delusion is beyond anything suffered by those of my people who brought down the Fall.’
Telok’s crystalline components pulsed a bruised crimson and the wrought iron portions of his Dreadnought-like frame vented superheated steam as debased floodstream boiled around his body.
Telok pointed a clawed hand towards Bielanna. ‘Your arrogance is matched only by your species’s pathetic reluctance to accept its doom. I should take lessons on humility from you? A race that clings pathetically to a lost empire sliding inevitably to ruin? I think not.’
‘Then we are well matched after all,’ said Bielanna.
Kotov looked up as another light appeared in the sky. This one was blue-hot and the shrill whine of boosters told him that this was an atmosphere-capable craft on an arc of descent.
‘What is that?’ asked Tanna.
The corona wreathing its engine nacelles blotted out the descending craft’s profile, but there was no doubting its Imperial provenance. Kotov saw an electromagnetic residue that was as familiar to him as the composition of his own floodstream.
‘It’s from the Speranza,’ he said.
‘It’s the Renard’s shuttle!’ cried Roboute Surcouf. ‘Emil!’
The shuttle’s engine noise growled and the main drives twisted against the airframe and deepened to a hard red as it flared out on its final approach.
‘Tarkis must have sent it,’ said Kotov.
‘Why would he send the rogue trader’s shuttle?’ said Tanna.
‘Does it matter?’ snapped Kotov. ‘We have help! Reinforcements!’
The Black Templars moved to battle pace, pulling ahead of Kotov and the Cadians. The eldar matched their speed, though Kotov saw they could easily outpace them. Telok’s platform was a hundred metres away, the shuttle from the Renard just touching down in an expanding cloud of propellant.
Kotov increased his pace, eager to see what manner of aid Tarkis Blaylock had sent to Exnihlio. Tanna’s question was needlessly defeatist. This ship had to have come from Tarkis. What other explanation could there be?
Kotov saw a human face in the shuttle’s armourglass canopy.
Emil Nader. Facial mapping of micro-expressions revealing great stress and heightened levels of anxiety.
The shuttle’s frontal ramp opened up and a figure emerged, wreathed in the fumes of its landing. Tall and black-robed, with a hood drawn up over his face.
‘Tarkis!’ cried Kotov. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus! Thank the Omnissiah, you came.’
The smoke of the shuttle’s landing cleared and Kotov’s floodstream ran cold as he saw the truth.
Tarkis Blaylock had not come to Exnihlio.
Galatea had.
Galatea approached Telok with grim purpose in its clattering, mismatched limbs. The blasphemous machine intelligence had finally come to enact its murderous intent in crossing the Halo Scar and hope leapt in Kotov’s breast.
‘Galatea,’ he cried, extending a mechadendrite. ‘Telok stands before you. Kill him! Kill him now, just as you have dreamed of doing for thousands of years!’
Telok’s laughter boomed out across the plaza.
‘Kill him?’ said Galatea. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We are his herald, his shadow avatar in the Imperium. We brought you to him and we will stand at his right hand when he becomes the new Master of Mars!’
The Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all.
There were times for humility and there were times for brass balls. This was a moment for the latter. Gunnar Vintras stood at the foot of Amarok and hauled Magos Ohtar towards him by the folds of his robes.
‘You heard me,’ he said. ‘You’re going to put me back into Amarok or I’m going to shove this laspistol somewhere the Omnissiah doesn’t shine and empty the powercell. Do we understand each other now?’
‘You waste your ire on me, Mister Vintras,’ said Ohtar. ‘Your reinstatement has nothing to do with me. It is for the Wintersun to decide when your penance is done. And he has given no indications as to his willingness to return you to the Pack.’
Vintras nodded towards Amarok’s glaring cano
py.
‘Who’ve you put in there anyway?’
‘Akelan Chassen was next in rotation.’
He heard the pause and laughed. ‘Chassen? I’ve seen his aptitude tests. He barely made moderati grade, let alone princeps.’
‘But he made them,’ pointed out Ohtar. ‘Not many ever do.’
‘But who would you rather have in Amarok? Someone who barely made the grade or someone who rewrote the book on how Warhounds fight? And best answer quickly, this place is going to be knee-deep in crystal monsters soon.’
Ohtar’s eyes rolled back in his sockets, and when they returned, they weren’t the ice-blue of augmetics, but amber flecked with opal, slitted with a slice of deepest black.
Vintras knew those eyes, he’d seen them on the black and silver mountain in the depths of an ice storm. They’d pinned him to the rock of the Oldbloods’ fortress and judged him worthy. And when Ohtar spoke, it was not with his own voice, but one channelled from the mighty head of Lupa Capitalina.
You dare demand a place in my Pack?+
Now was the time for humility.
Vintras dropped to one knee and said, ‘I seek only to aid the Pack, Lord Wintersun. I am the Skinwalker, I belong in a Titan!’
I stripped you of that title,+ said Princeps Arlo Luth. ‘I named you Omega and cast you from the Pack.+
‘Packs can be rejoined,’ said Vintras.
If the Alpha deems the outcast worthy of redemption,+ said Luth. +Are you worthy of mercy?+
‘I am,’ said Vintras, angling his neck and displaying his throat as he had done at his ritual of censure. The scar Elias Härkin had given him was pale and healed, but the angle of the cut ensured it would always be visible.
Princeps Luth regarded Vintras through the slitted eyes of an Oldblood. Crackling electrical fire was reflected there, fire that had no place in the eyes of a Mechanicus proxy.
Vintras turned from the hijacked body of Magos Ohtar, seeing bolt after bolt of alien lightning explode onto the deck.
Luth saw the same thing.
Mount your engine, Skinwalker,+ he ordered. +Fight as Pack!+
Kotov’s last hope crumbled in the face of Telok’s pronouncement. With Galatea at his side, every aspect of the machine-hybrid’s actions made a new and terrible sense. Roboute Surcouf’s analogy of the spider in its web was now proven entirely correct.
Like a dreadful puppet-master, Archmagos Telok had orchestrated every aspect of Kotov’s quest from the start. What level of commitment and preparedness must have gone into such a plan? Kotov could have almost admired the dizzying complexity of Telok’s machinations from beyond the edge of the galaxy were they not about to see him dead.
Kotov stared at Galatea with a hatred he had not known himself capable of experiencing. The machine-hybrid had set its snare with a tale of abandonment and vengeance, with just enough truth at the heart of its falsehoods to be credible.
And he had fallen for its lies.
‘Galatea,’ he said as the revelation of its true loyalties unlocked yet another. ‘From the myth of Old Earth, yes? That should have told me everything you said was a lie. The tale of the sculptor who crafts an ivory statue that he falls in love with, and which is then given life by a god… It is all right there.’
‘What’s right there?’ said Surcouf.
‘That Galatea was a creature of Telok’s,’ said Kotov. ‘Don’t you see? We assumed Galatea was what it claimed to be, a thinking machine, but it is not. It is both more and less than that.’
‘Then what is it?’ asked Tanna.
Kotov made his way to the landing platform, where Galatea squatted beside Telok. Microtremors shook its body, and the connections passing between the brain jars were strangely hostile, as though no longer entirely under Galatea’s control. The Lost Magos appeared oblivious to this, and nodded like a mentor encouraging a struggling pupil towards deeper understanding.
‘Go on,’ said Telok. ‘You’re so close, archmagos.’
‘It’s you,’ said Kotov. ‘Galatea isn’t a thinking machine at all. It’s been you all along, hasn’t it? Before you crossed the Halo Scar you excised a portion of your own consciousness and grafted it into the heuristic mechanisms of the machine’s neuromatrix. Every dealing we have had with Galatea has been with an aspect of your personality, hived from the throne of your cerebral cortex and given autonomy within this… this thing. You practically told me as much, with all your metaphysical nonsense about alphas and omegas and the self-created god. Your ego couldn’t pass up any chance to taunt us with your presence as a ghost in the machine.’
Kotov shook his head ruefully. ‘It beggars belief that I did not see it.’
‘As Galatea, I told you what you wanted to hear, Kotov,’ said Telok, ‘and in your desperation you chose to ignore the truth that was right in front of you.’
‘Why tell us that Galatea wanted to kill Telok?’ asked Surcouf.
‘Few motives are as pure as vengeance,’ said Galatea, its voice modulating to match Telok’s. ‘Would you have found us as credible if we simply offered to help you? We think not.’
By now Kotov and his attendant warriors had reached the foot of the landing platform. Kotov paused at the iron steps as he felt the particle vibration and neutron flow of the layered voids passing over him. Complex field interactions caused his noospherics and floodstream to grey out for a second.
In that instant, the Black Templars and Cadians had their weapons locked to their shoulders. They knew, as Kotov knew, that they were inside the voids protecting the raised platform.
‘Kill them,’ ordered Tanna.
Bolter fire erupted. Flashing las followed.
The eldar launched themselves into the air, going from complete standstill to bounding motion with no intermediate stage. They landed on the platform with a speed and sure-footedness that made Kotov gasp with astonishment.
Explosions erupted all over Telok’s body, but none impacted.
Ablative energy integral to his crystalline flesh ignited the bolt warheads prematurely and vaporised the flashing discs of the eldar weapons. Telok’s density was so enormous not even the kinetic force of the detonations staggered him.
Kotov’s skitarii put themselves between him and the gunshots. Their blades and weapons locked to Galatea. Issur and Varda climbed towards Telok, their swords singing from scabbards. The eldar reached him first, their swords shrieking blurs of ivory. They surrounded Telok, cutting and lashing him with crackling forks of anbaric energy.
Telok extended his clawed arms, sweeping around like some ancient practitioner of weaponless combat.
The eldar were too nimble, and laughed as they vaulted and swayed aside from his clumsy swipes.
But catching them had never been Telok’s aim.
A blitzing tempest of electrical vortices built around his arms and exploded outwards in a hurricane of white-green fire. The eldar warriors were hurled away, their armour melting and the plumes on their tapered helms ablaze. Telok’s laughter cut through their howls of pain.
Then Varda and Issur charged in.
The Emperor’s Champion swept below a bladed fist the size of a Contemptor’s claw. The Black Sword gouged a valley in Telok’s flank. Issur’s blow was blocked and before he could sidestep, a fit of rogue muscle spasms staggered him.
His paralysis lasted a fraction of a second only, but even that was too long. Telok bludgeoned him from the landing platform and Issur flew thirty metres through the air to land with a bone-crunching thud of cracked ceramite.
The Black Sword erupted from Telok’s hybridised metal and crystal body as Varda ran him through. Telok spun as Varda wrenched the blade clear, unleashing a storm of crackling binary that froze the Emperor’s Champion rigid.
Telok’s enormous claw closed on Varda’s body, ready to tear him apart. Before he could crush the life from Varda, a w
eave of glittering light engulfed his twisted features.
Kotov saw Bielanna down on one knee, her hands pressed to her forehead as she directed her energies into obliterating Telok’s mind with heinous witchcraft. Howling psychic energies blazed around Telok and he hurled Varda from the platform as a jagged, crystalline sheath rose from his shoulders.
‘Enough!’ roared Telok and Bielanna screamed as the arcane mechanisms wreathing his skull flared with incandescent energies.
‘This has gone on long enough,’ said Telok, as he and Galatea climbed onto the shuttle’s ramp. ‘Even my vanity has limits when it compromises my designs. The acausal bindings securing the hrud warrens are no more, so this world is entering its final entropic death spasms. I would ask you to bear witness to Exnihlio’s final moments, but you will be corpses long before it dies.’
Telok lifted his arms and the vast structures enclosing the plaza erupted with lightning from dozens of latticework vanes at their roofs. Forking bolts of energy arced down and slammed into the ground with deafening whipcracks of searing fire.
Kotov saw freshly wrought shapes emerge from the strobing after-images, glossy and humanoid, marching in lockstep to form a perfect circle around the landing platform.
A thousands-strong army of crystaliths.
She’d missed a lot of things about the regiment, but until now Kayrn Sylkwood hadn’t realised just how much she’d missed the thrill of marshalling armed forces under fire. The attackers were appearing without warning, materialising in explosions of writhing bonfires of lightning like a teleport assault.
The mechanics of their arrival didn’t matter.
It was, as her old drill sergeant used to say at every objection to his orders being completed on time, irrelevant.
Hurricanes of green fire flashed through the deck, flickering in opposition to bright bolts of red las. Percussive shock waves of explosions and thundering engines echoed from the hangar walls. Shouting squad leaders and the cries of burning soldiers put an extra punch in Kayrn’s step.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 103
