Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill
Page 111
But Linya had no inclination towards torture or revenge.
Instead, she turned to her fellow magi, and said, ‘It’s time.’
They nodded in unison as Magos Syriestte said, ‘The implanted code will be unequivocal and unsparing in its execution.’
‘I know, but it’s better this way,’ said Linya, unlocking the last hexamathic cell within her mind. The activation algorithms for the kill-code flooded into her consciousness. They merged with previously released binaric strings, becoming something utterly lethal to the electrical activity of the brain.
It grew, it replicated.
It destroyed.
The kill-code had penetrated deepest into Magos Haephaestus, and the venerable techno-theosopher was first to feel its effect. He bowed his head and vanished as the implanted kill-code woven into their linked neural network took effect. Linya felt Haephaestus die, and Telok’s avatar screamed as a portion of its heuristic neuromatrix was sheared away.
The kill-code destroyed Magos Natala. Then Txema, then Chivo.
With each brain-death, Telok’s avatar howled in loss, convulsing like a madman on the polished terrazzo floor of the viewing dome. One by one, the imprisoned magi were extinguished until only Linya and Telok’s avatar remained.
She felt each loss and tried not to hate the wretched, shrunken thing writhing before her like a hooked maggot on a line. She knelt beside the avatar. Stripped of its gestalt consciousnesses, it was a barely sentient conduit of data, a sheared potion of a much larger mind.
It was almost pitiable.
Almost.
‘Kill me and be done with it,’ said the avatar.
‘No,’ said Linya. ‘I still need you to do something for me.’
So much death…
Bielanna felt the last of her kin die.
The crystaliths tore them apart, perhaps realising what she attempted. Their strength now filled her, and Bielanna felt each spirit move within her rapidly crystallising flesh. The rapid push and pull of Exnihlio’s death spasms had imbued her with extraordinary power, but it had hurled her headlong towards the eventual fate of all farseers.
It came over her like an ultra-rapid shock-freeze.
No rest for her within the Dome of Crystal Seers.
They surrounded her, their limited awareness ill-equipped to process this new variable. Their orders were to kill creatures of flesh and blood, and they had done that.
Bielanna’s flesh was cold and hard, as glassy and reflective as the crystaliths. Her spirit and those of her fellow eldar burned brightly inside her. She took that energy and wove it around the power the Breath of the Gods had unleashed. The energy of a supernova condensed into a pure form of thought and expression.
Bielanna was done with her body of flesh and blood, and it had no more need for her. Only one realm called to her, a place of dreams and joy, where past and future entwined and the fate of all things was revealed.
Where the Path of the Seer inevitably led.
Bielanna cast off her mortal shell and threw her spirit into the skein. Freed from mortal constraints, she saw more than ever before, with a clarity the living could never know.
From this vantage point, Exnihlio appeared as a single atom out of place in the structure of a vast crystal. Any force applied to the crystal would always be concentrated on that atom. Soon another atom would be out of place, then another. And another.
Through such mechanisms were cracks in the universe begun.
And once begun, they propagated.
Like scissors cutting fabric.
But if that atom could be removed from the lattice…
Another Cadian died as Galatea speared him through the chest with a lancing strike of its mechadendrites. It tossed the man’s body across the bridge like a ragdoll before turning its attention upon Sergeant Rae. Kotov watched in slow motion as a blade-limb stabbed through the meat of the man’s thigh, pinning him in place as a coiling mechadendrite whipped up like a stinger.
To his credit, Rae didn’t flinch, but raised his useless lasrifle in a futile attempt to block the incoming strike.
‘Come on then, you bastard!’ shouted the Cadian.
The strike never came.
A grand-mal seizure wracked Galatea’s body, its palanquin vibrating like an engine on the verge of exploding. The limb pinning Rae to the deck wrenched clear as Galatea loosed a binaric scream of anguish so profound that it broke Kotov from his enhanced mode of cognition. His perception of time’s flow returned to its normal mode of operation, and the world seemed sluggish in comparison.
Telok staggered, as though whatever pain was wracking Galatea was stabbing him in the heart also. Given what Kotov knew of the symbiotic relationship between Telok and Galatea, perhaps it was.
An evil scarlet light swept around the palanquin, moving from brain jar to brain jar. The bio-gels within each jar instantly clouded, like stagnant water in a sump. Kotov had served two decades aboard a Tempestus battle-engine and saw the unmistakable signs of amniotic death.
Only one brain resisted the mass extinction, and Kotov knew instantly to whom it belonged. Coupled with the spectral visitation he had seen earlier, Kotov knew exactly what he had to do.
Galatea’s legs folded beneath it and its misaligned body crashed to the deck with a booming clang of dead metal. Its proxy body flopped over onto its front, black floodstream chemicals pumping from suddenly unmaintained bio-mechanical organs.
The Cadians stepped back, wary of some trick, but Yael was on Galatea in a heartbeat. He wasted no time in bringing his sword around in brutal, two-handed overhead strikes like an ironworker at the anvil. Surcouf joined him a second later, his Calthan blade wreaking terrible harm on Galatea’s robed body.
‘Leave the brains intact!’ shouted Kotov.
If Linya Tychon had indeed slain Galatea from within, then perhaps there was a chance to extricate her from the belly of the beast. How cruel a trick of fate would it be for her to avenge her mutilation only to be killed in the process?
Then Telok was amongst them.
His ironwork and crystal body throbbed with dark reds and crimsons. Plumes of scalding gases vented and his greasily artificial face was twisted in rage. Tearing claws smashed Cadian soldiers to boneless meat, ripped them to shredded matter.
Gone was the genius archmagos who had reconstructed the ancient machine of a long-dead race of galactic engineers. All that remained was a howling berserker creature, drowning its pain and grief in slaughter.
Kotov was never going to get a better chance than this.
‘With me,’ shouted Kotov. ‘By your lives or deaths, get me to the command throne.’
Kotov ran past the bloodshed, slipping on the lake of blood spreading across the deck. He kept his mind focused on putting himself back where he belonged.
‘Kotov!’ bellowed Telok.
He almost turned at the sound of his name.
Was almost stunned to immobility by the furious rank signifiers that matched his own.
‘Go!’ shouted Carna, pushing him forwards.
Kotov didn’t see the skitarii warrior’s death, but felt it resonate in the noosphere as a vast quantity of blood sprayed him. The second skitarii, whose name he hadn’t bothered to inload, died a second later, torn in two at the waist.
Kotov kept going. Thundering impacts sounded behind him.
He didn’t dare look round. He felt hot, dead breath on him. Crystalline claws swept down to cleave him apart.
Then Yael and Surcouf were there.
The rogue trader was smashed to the deck, no match for Telok’s vast strength. Only Yael had the power to take the blow, his genhanced physique a match for Telok’s hideous crystalline embellishments.
Even so, he was driven back, the plates of his armour broken, the bones of his arms shattered.
It w
as foolish defiance, the last act of desperate men with nothing left to lose.
But it was just enough.
Kotov threw himself onto the Speranza’s command throne, slamming his hands down onto haptic connectors that still bore traces of molten metal and flesh.
Telok loomed over him, his inhuman features no longer recognisable as anything sane. His clawed arm pulled back, the blood of countless innocents upon it. The killing energies of Exnihlio burned along every blade.
Telok’s claw hammered through Kotov’s chest and into the throne.
Its haptics burned hot. Golden illumination, like the birth of all machines, rammed into Kotov’s skull.
A conduit was established, a connection made.
Like a surge tide in spate, the world spirit of the Speranza rose up to engulf Kotov and Telok.
And not just the Speranza’s.
I have been here before.
That was the first thought to enter Kotov’s head as he saw the neon-bright datascape of the Speranza open up to him.
I should be dead, was the second.
He remembered Telok’s claw punching down through his chest, a shattering blow of awful power. Kotov’s body was largely mechanised, but enough remained of his nervous and circulatory system to make such damage almost certainly fatal.
A glittering megalopolis spread before him, the flow of information that formed the hidden arteries of the Speranza. It was mountainous, rugged with hives of light and vast termite mounds of agglomerated data. Abyssal cliffs of contextually linked information hubs spiralled into fractal mazes of answers that led to ever more questions.
Datacores burned like newborn suns in constellations of linked neural networks. The Speranza was in constant dialogue with itself, learning and growing with every solution gained.
Heuristic in the purest sense of the word.
Every paradigm of scalable time, from the cosmic day to the compression of universal history to a single hour, failed utterly to capture the datascape’s infinite scope. Its mysteries went back to the first stone tools hacked from river bedrock and stretched into the Omega Point, the Logos and Hyparxis all in one.
And for all that this aspect of the Speranza was a place of knowledge and understanding, it was also one of metaphor, allusion and maddening symbolism.
Highways of light were easy enough to interpret, but what of the vast, serpentine coils arcing above and below to encircle the world before coming around to engulf itself? What of the conjoined helices of light that split apart like the branches of a towering tree with its roots dug deep into the datascape?
Could he even see these things truly or was his hominid brain simply interpreting the unknown in ways he could process?
Looking down (if down was even a concept that could be applied to infinitely dimensional realms of thought) it was clear how foolish and naïve he had been to claim he was Speranza’s master.
Knowledge was not a something to be claimed, it existed for all those with the wisdom to seek it, for only in the acceptance of ignorance could that void be filled. That felt like revelation, but Kotov suspected it was ancient wisdom he and his order had long forgotten.
Kotov turned and saw Telok soaring above the datascape, no longer the monstrous being he had become, but the magos he had once been. His robes were black, his optics a glittering silver. The resemblance to Galatea was so startling, Kotov wondered how he had not seen it before.
said Telok, circling Kotov like a stalking predator. The Lost Magos swept his gaze around the infinite landscape and Kotov felt his burning need to possess it.
Kotov laughed.
said Kotov as glittering dataforms of Linya Tychon and Abrehem Locke appeared at his side.
Once the bane of Kotov’s life, Abrehem Locke wavered like a distorted hologram, his outline blurred where motes of darkness drifted from his body like ash from a cindered corpse. Linya Tychon was restored, her skin unblemished once again where the fire in Amarok had crippled her and whole where Galatea had mutilated her. She turned to Kotov and it seemed as though a multitude of overlaid spirits stared out through her eyes.
said Linya.
Telok shrugged, as if the answer was of no interest.
Telok sighed, but it was a distraction only.
He hurled himself at Kotov, fast as thought.
Physics held no sway here, only imagination. Wounded, Kotov dropped through layers of data, informational light skimming past at superliminal speeds. Telok followed him down, constructing calculus proofs of space-time curvature to increase his speed. Kotov led him through canyons of databases, where information passed back and forth in collimated streams of data-dense light. The sense of movement and velocity was intoxicating.
Abrehem and Linya spiralled around Telok in a double helix. She clawed at Telok’s experiential armour, stripping it from him in long chains of boolean notation. Hexamathic blades, against which Telok had no protection, stabbed into him.
Ancient technology unknown to the Adeptus Mechanicus batted her away as Telok’s vast intellect surged to the fore. Abrehem flew in close to Telok and the golden fire that had burned Galatea’s vile touch from the Speranza seared into Telok’s form.
Telok howled in rage as his shields of logarithmic complexity were burned away. A mastery of nanotechnology, the likes of which Abrehem was utterly ill-equipped to comprehend, sent his attacker spinning away.
Kotov spun away from Telok’s fire, rising from the database canyons and looping around a soaring column of engine cores, where the impossible calculations to breach the barriers of the warp were agreed upon.
He thrust his hands out before him and a glittering shield of pure logic reflected Telok’s attacks back at him. Telok roared in pain as the two archmagi came together in an explosion of fractal light. Circling the engine datacore and bathing in its bewildering, non-linear solutions, they came apart and smashed together again and again.
Gods of data and knowledge, their wisdom gave them power.
All they had learned and all they had explored. Every belief, every expression of wonder. All were transformed into killing thoughts. Chains of accumulated knowledge tore aetherial bodies, words as weapons, digits as ammunition.
They fell through the datascape, plunging into the heart of sun-hot datacores, emerging in streamers of light that were drawn into their death struggle. The battle left a burning wake in the Speranza’s heart as they spun around one another like gravity-locked comets, inextricably linked and plunging to mutual self-annihilation.
They fought like two alpha males vying for dominance.
And as the alchemists of Old Earth had always known: as above, so below. Where they fought the Speranza shuddered with sympathetic agonies.
In the portside testing arrays every single experimental weapon system activated without warning and blew a three-hundred-metre tear in the hull.
A ventral chem-store went into a feedback loop in its mix ratios and crafted a lethal bio-toxin that was only prevented from entering the ship’s filtration systems by the last-minute intervention of a nameless lexmechanic.
Forge-temples whose alpha-numeric designations contained the data-packet of 00101010 had their libraries wiped, condemning millennia of accumulated learning to dust.
All across the Speranza the collateral damage of their battle was tearing the ship apart.
Linya and Abrehem followed in the wake of the devastation, barely able to keep pace with the two warring gods. Though they were gifted in their own ways, neither had the accumulated wisdom and experience of an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus.