He and the surviving crew of the Renard had mourned the death of Adara Siavash in a simple ceremony in a small portside temple, asking the Emperor to watch over the soul of their fallen friend.
Archmagos Kotov’s anger at Ilanna Pavelka had eventually reached a low enough ebb that he finally consented to allowing her to seek repair in one of the Speranza’s forge-temples.
When the day came for her bio-mechanical surgery, Roboute was surprised to see Kotov himself scrubbing up at the head of a sixteen-strong team of neuro-magi and cognitive-optical technicians. Thirty-six hours later, the work was complete.
It took three more months before Pavelka’s neural architecture regrew the required synaptic connections to process the inloads from her new optics.
By then, the Renard had already parted ways with the Speranza.
Seated at the helm, Roboute Surcouf rested his hand on the astrogation compass. Its needle pointed unwaveringly towards their new destination.
Ultramar.
The military might of the expedition carried on much as it had on the journey from the Imperium to space unknown. They trained, they rested, they spoke of the dead. The mission was done, and as Guardsmen of Cadia, that was what mattered most.
That, and the fact they were still alive.
Colonel Ven Anders would remain sealed in cryo-freeze for the journey. His mortal remains were returning to Cadia, where they would be interred in one of the many cemeteries of Kasr Holn, until the Law of Decipherability decreed that his remains be moved to one of the charnel pits.
A remembrance ceremony for the fallen was held on the training deck. Every single Guardsman of the 71st stood to attention before a reviewing stand set up before the Palace of Peace. The battle-engines of Legio Sirius towered over the proceedings, kill banners freshly marked with heraldic sigils of Cadia and Mars.
Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica flanked the Palace of Peace, while Amarok and Vilka stood among the six thousand Cadians in their dress greys with their lasrifles resting on their shoulders.
Brother Yael of the Black Templars stood in his ebon battleplate, its lustre restored by the Speranza’s finest artificers. His grief was so palpable, so consuming, that none dared come near him, leaving him to bear the memory of his fallen brothers alone.
Magos Dahan and his elite skitarii packs stood shoulder to shoulder with the men and women of Cadia who’d fought to defend their ship. Thousands of cybernetic soldiers and praetorian servitors marched past the reviewing stand, banners and weapons held high with pride.
Dahan himself took to the stand to join Captain Blayne Hawkins in presenting the Address to the Fallen. As the last benediction was spoken, the war-horns of Legio Sirius filled the deck.
A victory bellow and a lament all in one.
Far below the waterline, in an area of the ship abandoned by all but the most desperate bondsmen and tech-priests, a lone figure made his way along a dripping passageway. Hawke had last come down here around six months ago, looking for a place to site another illegal alcohol still.
Not much had changed.
Habitations that were little more than packing crates, sheets of tarpaulin and wadded packing materials filled every nook and cranny, proof positive that human beings could find a way to make even the most dismal places home.
No more than a few hundred lived in this particular shanty zone, making it above average size for such a refuge. Ever since the boarding action by the crystalline attackers, there’d been more and more of these kinds of places springing up below the waterline. It had been the same back on Joura for those who couldn’t work or find a way to make themselves useful.
Hawke paused at a junction of dark passageways wreathed in plumes of vent smoke as the sensation of being watched crawled up his spine. Down here there wasn’t a square centimetre of space where someone didn’t have eyes on you, but this was something more.
Over the years, Hawke had by necessity developed a finely honed sense for when he was being watched with malicious intent. He didn’t see anything out of place, just the usual malcontents and desperate fools. He told himself he was being paranoid, but given what he was carrying, a healthy dose of paranoia was no bad thing.
He carried on, passing a few faces he recognised, many more he didn’t. That didn’t surprise him. New souls were always washing up, falling through the cracks to end up in places like this.
And not just bondsmen either.
Disgraced tech-priests, damaged lexmechanics and the like, they ended up here too. More than Hawke had thought, but even that had turned out to be an opportunity. The abandoned and the cast aside were often the best source of his tradeable goods.
Hawke hadn’t come to trade.
Today he was after something more.
It had taken a long time to get back into Forge Elektrus. Manubia hated him, and was always telling him that he was not welcome in her forge, despite the fact she welcomed hundreds of worshippers every day who came to see the Sightless Saint.
It had been Hawke’s blood that had kept Abrehem alive!
Didn’t that make him holy or something?
But Manubia couldn’t keep him out forever, and eventually he’d managed to find a way in past her Protectors. And now here he was, hunting for a black clinic he hoped was still here.
A pouch of ash-like powder nestled in the pocket of his coveralls. It was a concoction he’d taken real care to develop, the residue left by the crystal beasts, mixed with a potent cocktail of stimms and e-mag rich discharge from high-end cogitators.
He called it NuBlack, and it was already on a list of proscribed substances, what with it being highly addictive to those with floodstream-based biology.
Which only made it more desirable to the kind of person he was hoping to find.
Hawke grinned as he saw the unmarked door to the black clinic just where he remembered it. He pushed past the buckled shutter and straps of thick plastic, wrinkling his nose at the smell of hot metal, cheap disinfectant, rotten meat and burned skin.
A tech-priest with a hunched spine and ragged, oil-stained robes of faded orange turned to face him as he entered. A hissing, wheezing armature of rusted metal arms was clamped to his back, and his half-metal, half-human face was grey and leprous.
‘Hawke,’ said the tech-priest with undisguised hostility. ‘What do you want?’
‘Hello, Dadamax,’ said Hawke, looking around the filthy interior of the black clinic. ‘Keeping the place as clean as ever, I see.’
Hissing canisters of noxious gases lined one wall and gurgling pipework diverted chemicals from where they were intended to go. Fragments of disassembled augmetics and flesh-couplers lay in pieces on grimy workbenches. Glass-fronted cabinets, their doors cracked and opaque with dirt, contained numerous jars of things best left to the imagination.
‘I asked you a question,’ said Dadamax. ‘I told you I didn’t want you around here again. You bring too much attention. I should never have sold you that ancient plasma pistol.’
Hawke pretended to look hurt.
‘Come on, Dada, my old friend, don’t be like that,’ said Hawke, taking out the pouch of NuBlack and waving it before him. ‘I brought you a little present.’
Dadamax eyed the pouch with a pathetic mix of hope and revulsion. Word was, Dadamax had been clean for weeks and was trying to work his way back updeck, but Hawke was betting he’d take the pouch and do what he asked.
One of the manipulator arms creaked and snatched the pouch from Hawke’s fingers.
‘What do you want for this?’ asked Dadamax.
‘Nothing much, just a little implant surgery.’
Dadamax turned, interested now.
‘On who?’
‘On me,’ said Hawke, holding out Abrehem Locke’s augmetic eyes.
Vodanus watched the mortal pause at the opening of the shadowed passageway. H
e looked about him, as though aware he was being observed. Vodanus eased farther back into the darkness and enshrouding clouds of vapour.
The man’s smell was rank and unpleasant. They all were, but this one carried a pouch of caustic chemicals injurious to mechanised anatomy. A flicker of curious code had drifted from beneath its clothes. Something small, yet advanced beyond most other forms of technology upon which Vodanus had fed since leaving the geas-giver’s planet.
The code-scent of the prey it had originally been sent to kill was aboard this ship, but Vodanus no longer cared. Telok was dead and Vodanus was free of the restrictive prohibitions the geas had laid upon it.
Vodanus could have killed the mortal and devoured the curious code it carried, but was loath to risk unnecessary exposure, however tempting the morsel.
Not when this ship was carrying it to an entire world of prey.
Vodanus had crawled from the wreckage of the linear induction train with its spine shattered by the force of impact. That and the malign code in its enemies’ weapons had vitiated its self-repair technologies, and it had taken it longer than anticipated to resume its hunt.
Too late, it had tracked its quarry to the plaza, finding him surrounded by an army of the geas-giver’s crystaliths. Too many for even Vodanus to fight through without its self-repair functions in good order. Instead, it had seen the descending shuttle and plotted its inbound trajectory to ascertain from where it had launched.
It sensed the presence of a mighty ship, thick with the target’s code-scent, and had seized its opportunity. Secretly clawing its way onto the shuttle’s hull, Vodanus endured the void-chill of space to reach this magnificent vessel, a battleship easily the equal in scale of the war-barques its masters had wrought to mass murder.
Vodanus had kept to the lower decks since then, destroying only when it needed to feed, smashing open only the smallest engines and draining their light.
Sustenance was enough. Glut would come later.
It padded away from the opening of the passageway, through clouds of oily smoke to the lair it had made in an abandoned reclamation chamber.
Patience was the prime virtue of the best hunters.
And Vodanus was nothing if not patient.
It could wait until the Speranza reached Mars.
Blaylock sat at his workbench in his quarters, staring down at the Mars Volta. It reflected the light of recessed lumens, and the deep red sheen of its lacquered surface was a source of great confusion to him ever since the Speranza had returned to Imperial space.
Much remained to be explained in the wake of Telok’s death and the inexplicable ending of the imminent cataclysm of a space-time rupture. His report to the Fabricator General would cite innumerable examples of inexact methodology and explanations that lacked any solid basis of fact.
Both Archmagos Kotov and Roboute Surcouf had been maddeningly imprecise as to the nature of their experiences on the bridge. Kotov had spoken to Blaylock of a great battle within the datasphere, of gods of knowledge, a bondsman and Linya Tychon. And, most allegorical of all, a vast golden sword he likened to that carried by the Omnissiah at the Pax Olympus.
Surcouf’s account of the final fate of the eldar was likewise full of hyperbole and allegory. An undoubted psychic event had transpired, but his tales of threads and potential futures being woven by their witch belonged in a hive-fantasist’s palimpsest.
But what puzzled him the most was why he kept finding himself seated before the Mars Volta with his fingertips on its wooden planchette.
Fifteen times since leaving Exnihlio, Blaylock had found himself sitting at his workbench with no memory of how he had come to be there. Upon checking his memory coils, he would find himself engaged in a mundane task of shipboard operation. Then, without any apparent gaps or lapses in time, he would be seated at this bench, his fingers twitching with ideomotor responses.
Each time he had fought the urge to move the planchette and hurried to a far distant region of the ship, throwing himself into another time-consuming task.
Now he was here again, seated before Magos Alhazen’s gift and feeling the urge to move the planchette around the edges of the board, where the quantum rune combinations, binaric pairs and blessed ordinals glittered invitingly.
The perfectly geometric lines etched into its surface beguiled his optics, and Blaylock felt his hands move the planchette over the board.
The last time he had used the Mars Volta it had allowed him to find Archmagos Kotov. The divine will of the Omnissiah had moved within him, so perhaps, at this sixteenth return to the board, it was time to see what message might be received.
Blaylock slid the planchette across the board, feeling a curious sense of liberation as it revealed first one letter, then another.
At first they made no sense.
And then they did, but it was too late to stop. The planchette was moving with a will of its own. Or rather, the will of another.
T-Y-G-E-R, T-Y-G-E-R.
Blaylock froze in place.
He remained that way for nine hours.
Then lifted one arm, examined it. Lifted the other.
Blaylock moved away from the workbench and looked about him as though seeing his surroundings for the first time.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This will do.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graham McNeill has written more Horus Heresy novels than any other Black Library author! His canon of work includes Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written a Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Time of Legends trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award, and the anthology Elves. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Priests of Mars © Games Workshop Ltd 2012.
Lords of Mars © Games Workshop Ltd 2013.
Gods of Mars © Games Workshop Ltd 2014.
Zero Day Exploit © Games Workshop Ltd 2014.
This omnibus edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak
© Games Workshop Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2011, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78251-979-9
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
See the Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com
Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
www.games-workshop.com
eBook license
This license is made between:
Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and
(2) the purchaser of an e-book product
from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)
(jointly, “the parties”)
These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:
* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:
o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;
o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and
* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.
* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:
o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 114
