‘Flesh-voice if you please, Tarkis.’
Blaylock nodded and said, ‘Where is Archmagos Kotov?’
‘Dead.’
Blaylock nodded. It had been the only logical answer.
Galatea appeared behind Telok, the black robes of its proxy body soaked in the blood of skitarii and its blade-limbs coated in the stuff. Chunks of hewn flesh lay like butcher’s offal on its lopsided palanquin, where the brain jars of its captive minds crackled and glimmered with furious activity. Blaylock saw one of the jars had been broken, the grey matter within now absent. He wondered who had been discarded from Galatea’s neuromatrix.
‘It was close to a statistical certainty that you would betray us,’ said Blaylock.
‘Betray is such a hostile word, Tarkis,’ said Galatea. ‘We were merely following the precepts of a plan set in motion millennia ago. That we had to deceive you to see it to fruition was a small price to pay.’
Blaylock saw movement behind Galatea.
Kryptaestrex.
Disengaging from his station and powering up his overpowered manipulator limbs. Never before had Blaylock been more grateful for a senior magos who resembled a load-lifting combat servitor than he was right at this moment.
He kept his voice entirely neutral.
‘What do you intend?’
Telok smiled and the gesture was as alien as anything Blaylock had ever seen.
‘Come now, Tarkis, you already know what I intend,’ said Telok, withdrawing his claw and lifting his arms to encompass the bridge. ‘The Speranza is now my ship. I intend to return to Mars with the Breath of the Gods and take control of the Mechanicus.’
Now it was Blaylock’s turn to laugh.
‘Until we reached this world, I never believed you really existed. And even then I assumed the years of isolation must have made you mad. I see now that I was entirely correct in this latter assumption.’
Kryptaestrex was now fully disengaged from his MIUs. He just had to keep Telok’s attention for a little longer. Within a compartmentalised section of his mind, Blaylock constructed a shut-down code like the one he had used to prevent Vitali Tychon from killing Galatea.
Oh, how he regretted that decision.
‘The ship is not yours yet,’ said Blaylock. ‘Our military forces will repel your crystalline army. Already their cohesion is falling away in the face of superior skill and strength.’
‘Yes, I felt the demise of the nexus-creature I sent aboard,’ said Telok. ‘But I have already assumed command of the crystaliths aboard the Speranza. And when we regain control of the datasphere, we will purge every last deck of oxygen and heat to kill your soldiers deck by deck.’
Regain control…?
Then the war in the datascape Blaylock had witnessed was some part of the Speranza fighting back as he had hoped. Telok’s careless words also implied that Galatea’s hold on the ship’s vital systems was no longer in place.
If ever there was a time to strike, it was now.
Blaylock reached into his compartmentalised thoughts at the same time as Kryptaestrex made his move. He unleashed a focused spear of stand-down codes straight at Telok, each binaric string freighted with every authority signifier and title proof Blaylock possessed.
Such a searing volume and intensity of code would have staggered a Warlord Titan, but it had no visible effect on Telok.
Kryptaestrex snapped his claws shut on Galatea’s torso, crushing the proxy body. He wrenched it backwards, and an oil-squirting stump of writhing, chrome-plated spinal column erupted from the machine-hybrid’s belly.
Telok spun and hammered his monstrously oversized fists into Kryptaestrex’s chest. Crystalline claws punched through the boxy housing of his body like the power claws of a chrono-gladiator.
Kryptaestrex was simply obliterated.
Blaylock initiated an emergency decoupling from the command throne, its MIU ribbon connectors retracting into their spinal ports. Finished with his murder, Telok turned to face him with a look of profound disappointment.
‘Really, Tarkis? That was the best you could do?’ said Telok. ‘I’d hoped Magos Alhazen would have better prepared you.’
‘How could you possibly–’
Telok didn’t let him finish.
‘Perhaps something more like this,’ said Telok. ‘Tyger, tyger.’
The effect was instantaneous.
Blaylock’s mind went into spasms as it suffered a synaptic overload comparable to an epileptic seizure. Even as he tumbled from the command throne the perceptual centres of his brain were overwhelmed by the fearful symmetry of an orange and black feline stalking a moonlit forest.
What Telok had done was as catastrophic as it was complete.
He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak.
Only his visual systems had been left unaffected.
Galatea looked down at him with its lifeless silver eyes. Its proxy body had been savagely twisted and broken, hanging limply over the palanquin like a lifeless marionette.
Yet it was still, hatefully, functional.
The machine-hybrid jerked, as though mocking Blaylock’s spasming contortions. The brains flickered, in time with Galatea’s involuntary motion. Were they the cause of its internal distress? Impossible to tell, but perhaps Mistress Tychon was causing more trouble than the vile machine had banked upon.
Galatea turned away and limped out of his angle of vision in the direction of Azuramagelli’s station. Blaylock could see nothing of what was happening, but from the sound of breaking glass and snapping MIU ribbons, knew it was nothing good.
‘The astrogation hub is secure,’ said Galatea.
‘Excellent,’ said Telok. ‘Then plot a course for Mars.’
Even with the Speranza under attack, the Path to Wisdom was still thronged with tech-priests. They huddled around the vast columns in a fug of incense, endlessly studying the unending streams of ticker-tape and nonsense binary streaming from the carvings wrought into the doric capitals atop each column.
They ignored the Renard’s grav-sled as Roboute steered it towards the gigantic doors at its far end. A heavy slab of rectangular iron with a pilot’s bay at one end and an underslung repulsor generator, the sled scattered chanting groups of lexmechanics bearing armfuls of rolled scrolls. Servo-skulls crossing the vaulted space loosed squeals of irritated binary as they flitted from its path.
Much like the rest of them, the grav-sled had seen better days. Its structure and engine had been shot, pummelled and overloaded on Katen Venia to the point of it being very nearly written off by Kayrn Sylkwood upon its eventual return to the Renard.
Roboute had made a sacred vow to repair the sled, and though it had taken him the best part of the journey to Exnihlio to do it, he had been true to his word.
The grav-sled wasn’t a passenger transport, it was a cargo carrier. Its rear compartment was little more than a corrugated cuboid space capable of bearing sixty metric tonnes.
More than enough to transport Sergeant Rae’s men and their lethal mix of weapons. The veteran sergeant and his men had rendezvoused with them at the dorsal end of the Path to Wisdom, looking like they’d been in the fight of their lives. Rae was genuinely pleased to see his commanding officer, but looked distinctly unhappy at his current assignment.
Roboute didn’t care.
All he cared about was getting to the bridge and killing Galatea. The machine-hybrid had always been a thing to avoid, but with its revealed treachery, together with its killing of Adara Siavash and its mutilation of Linya, it had become Roboute’s sworn enemy.
His cheeks were wet with tears as he guided the sled along the Path to Wisdom. He ignored its many incredible sights, the diamond and chromium-plated pillars, the lapis-lazuli inscriptions and golden wirework murals. The soaring vault of the ceiling, with its circuit diagram frescoes of ancient Mars, was an irrele
vance to him. Nothing now had any meaning to Roboute.
He’d wanted a life beyond the stars, beyond the Imperium, but all he had found were the same treacheries, the same greed and the same insane ambition. Now Adara was dead and Ilanna likely blinded for the rest of her life.
How many more of his friends would have to suffer for his quixotic desire to leave the Imperium? None, he decided.
Kotov and Yael sat to his right, both lost in thought.
Why had they crossed the Halo Scar?
Yael was a crusader of the Black Templars, and the warriors of his Chapter were driven by an imperative from a time before the Imperium. Bound to notions of expanding the Emperor’s realm, they could no more have turned from this quest than stopped breathing.
Desperation, greed and, yes, perhaps even a truthful desire to expand mankind’s reservoir of knowledge was at the heart of Kotov’s motivations. Each of them had crossed the Halo Scar seeking something to fill a void, to satisfy a need they hadn’t even admitted to themselves.
Were their reasons any more or less noble than his own? He didn’t think so. The worst thing was that they had each found what they were looking for.
And now they were paying the price for that.
‘Galatea killed my friends,’ Roboute said. ‘So when we get to the bridge, does anyone object if I kill it?’
‘My brothers lie dead beneath an alien sun, their legacy left unharvested,’ said Yael, and suddenly he no longer looked like a young warrior. ‘Telok and Galatea die by my hand.’
‘The Speranza is a Mechanicus vessel,’ said Kotov, reasoned, logical hatred in every word. ‘Taken by an abomination and a traitor. A servant of the Omnissiah must be the one to end them.’
‘Fine,’ said Roboute. ‘Then everyone gets to kill it.’
The vast doors to the bridge loomed ahead of them, and Roboute slowed the grav-sled as he saw a scrapyard’s worth of broken machinery heaped at their base.
Praetorians, weaponised servitors, combat-hulks, skitarii kill-packs. At least two hundred shattered, las-burned and hacked-apart bodies. There had been a ferocious battle fought here, but something was missing.
‘Who were they fighting?’
‘They did this to themselves,’ said Kotov.
‘They killed each other?’ asked Yael.
‘The placement of the bodies and the nature of their wounds offers no other conclusion,’ said Kotov as Roboute brought the sled to a swift halt.
‘Telok?’ said Roboute.
‘Telok or Galatea,’ replied Kotov. ‘Not that it makes any difference. They’re still dead.’
Yael dropped to the ground as Colonel Anders, Sergeant Rae and ffiteen Guardsmen clambered from the back of the grav-sled. They spread out in a loose arrowhead formation, rifles unwavering in their sectors of responsibility. Yael moved away from the sled, his bolter sweeping for targets.
Anders craned his neck to look up the length of the door.
‘That’s a big damn door,’ he said. ‘Anyone know how to open it?’
Climbing down into the midst of the dead Mechanicus soldiery, Roboute had to agree with Kotov’s assessment of how they had died. He slung his rotary shotgun around, wrapping his fingers around the textured grip and placing his other hand on the recoil stabiliser.
The archmagos picked his way quickly through the shattered bodies to a lectern panel at the side of the huge door. A pair of circling skulls floated above the lectern, their jaws open wide in expressions of horror, witnesses to the slaughter.
Kotov’s skitarii went after him, and their fury at what had been done here was plain to see. Roboute followed at a more measured pace as Kotov’s mechadendrites opened a hatch at the base of the lectern. Blue light haloed Kotov’s features.
Roboute tapped the wide-mouthed barrel of his shotgun against the metres-thick door to the bridge.
‘Does the fact that Telok can turn our weapons against us and paralyse our armour, or that his avatar is in control of the ship, give anyone second thoughts about what’s going to happen when we get through here?’
No one answered.
‘Thought not,’ he said, picking a path towards Kotov. ‘So, can you get us onto the bridge?’
The archmagos didn’t answer. A shower of hissing sparks exploded from the hatch. Kotov fell back, feedback current rippling along the length of his mechadendrites. Flames licked from the hatch, and molten metal dribbled down the lectern.
‘No,’ said Archmagos Kotov. ‘I cannot.’
‘On your left!’ shouted Tanna, blocking a blow and rolling his wrists to thrust his blade into the blank face of a crystalith. Varda swayed aside from the blow arcing towards his head, and spun on his heel to decapitate his attacker.
The Black Templars were in constant motion. Circling the kneeling eldar. Like temple guards protecting priests whose credo forbade violence of any sort.
Never stop, never give the enemy a chance to mass.
A shimmering nimbus of light haloed the xenos, a sure sign of their witchery that would normally have earned Tanna’s undying hate. That it had come to this, warriors of the Black Templars fighting to protect the life of eldar, was a measure of the strange turns life could take.
Bielanna sat in the centre of the eldar circle. Corposant danced along her limbs. Light bled from her eyes in mercurial tears.
‘Low on your right,’ said Varda, and Tanna swept his sword down.
A crystalline blade shattered on the hard edge of his notched sword. The grip still thrummed in his hand, the spirit within revelling in the fight.
‘Emperor bless you, Ilanna Pavelka,’ said Tanna. His blade was long blunted, but every blow that broke the surface layers of crystal was a killing one.
Tanna barged with his shoulder, making space. The enemy was fast and strong, but he was a Space Marine. His boot thundered against a crystal kneecap, shattering it. His elbow spun out and pulverised a glassy skull. He fought with all the skill and strength bred into him by the fleshwrights of his Chapter and the genesmiths of a forgotten age.
‘For Kul Gilad,’ said Tanna, killing another animated monster.
‘And Bracha,’ shouted Varda in answer.
‘An… and Auiden,’ said Issur as they came together again.
The honoured dead fought with them, carried in their very souls and every killing blow. And though he bled from a score of wounds, Tanna’s heart was that of Sigismund. A mighty organ forged upon the anvil of battle in the Imperium’s darkest hour.
And while it still beat, he would fight.
As would they all.
Issur’s blade cut a deadly path through the crystaliths. His jawline was taut with the effort of controlling his spasms. His footwork was faultless, his bladework sublime. He would have made a formidable Emperor’s Champion had the war-visions come to him.
That honour had gone to Atticus Varda, a warrior who had never once defeated Issur in the practice cages, but whose heart was unclouded by petty resentments. Clad in the Armour of Faith and wielding the Black Sword, Varda was a towering figure. A hero from the Chapter annals, worthy of mention in the same breath as Bayard, Grimaldus, Navarre and Efried.
He moved with fluid economy, never stopping, finding space where no space existed. Earning that extra fraction of a second to parry or counter-attack. To watch Varda fight was to witness all that was best in a warrior.
Tanna knew that he was the least of them. Skilled, but outclassed on every level. His sword bludgeoned where theirs countered, hacked where theirs cut cleanly. Yet for all that his technique left something to be desired, the results spoke for themselves.
The crystaliths massively outnumbered them in odds that were almost comically absurd. Thousands to one. Odds that not even the gene-fathers of the Legions themselves could have fought.
Tanna doubted he had ever fought with such preternatural
skill.
His death would be magnificent.
His flesh might not return to the Chapter, but Yael would carry his memory to the Eternal Crusader and the legacy of the Kotov Crusade would endure.
Tanna blocked an overhead cut, swaying aside from a thrusting spike of crystal. The enemy hadn’t come at them with any energy weapons, just blades. And they had returned the favour. He felt a line of fire score across his hip and sidestepped, smashing his elbow down on a sword arm. The limb shattered and Tanna kicked his foe in the gut. He followed up the kick with a low sweep, wide and hard. Three crystaliths went down, and Tanna saw a gap open up before him.
‘Close ranks!’ shouted Varda.
Too far extended, enemies on the left and right.
A smashing cut struck Tanna on the shoulder, another on the thigh. The first bounced clear, the second drew blood. He killed both attackers, but he’d been staggered.
Another blow caromed from his breastplate, and Tanna reeled from the force of it. Crystaliths poured past him as he pushed himself to his feet. More surged towards him. His only advantage was that they couldn’t all come at him at once.
Tanna stepped back to the fighting formation of his brothers and hacked down a crystalith with its bladed arm buried in the back of an eldar warrior. The tip of the blade jutted from the alien’s chest, but she made no sound as she died. Another fell with his head almost severed. The remaining eldar groaned with each death, as though they felt the pain of each loss within themselves.
Tanna returned the favour, beheading the eldar’s killer.
‘Push… th… th… them back on the right,’ shouted Issur. The swordsman’s blade had broken, snapped halfway along its length. No longer a broadsword, more a jagged gladius.
Tanna took a quarter turn left and charged, shoulder low. Pain flared. He’d been hurt there before and his armour’s stimms were exhausted. He hurled the enemy back.
‘Step in,’ ordered Varda.
The three Templars stepped together, forming the points of a triangle around the eldar. Pools of blood made their footing treacherous, but the debris of the destroyed crystaliths gave them traction. Not all of that blood was eldar. Both Issur and Varda bled from a score of wounds, and Tanna’s biology burned hot as it fought to heal and keep pace with the energy demands he was making of it.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 108
