Forges Of Mars, page 44
The tension on Ismael’s face relaxed. ‘This one does.’
‘Deactivate this instant!’ ordered Saiixek, unleashing a bludgeoning stream of binaric shut down commands.
Ismael staggered with the force of Saiixek’s authority signifiers, dropping to one knee before the red-robed magos with his head bowed. Saiixek stepped past the kneeling servitor, but Ismael’s servo-limb reached up and clamped down hard on his arm.
Ismael’s iron clad head lifted and he looked Saiixek straight in the eye.
‘No,’ said Ismael, rising to his feet. ‘We. Will. Not.’
Only then did Abrehem realise why Ismael kept saying we.
Encircling the skitarii in an unbroken ring of flesh and iron were hundreds of dispensing servitors, each one staring with a fixed expression at the drama unfolding in the feeding hall. Abrehem guessed there were at least five hundred servitors surrounding the skitarii, all heavily augmented with powerful servo-arms and pain-blockers.
Ismael had once claimed to be able to hear the other servitors, but Abrehem had had no idea that line of communication worked both ways.
‘He made us remember,’ said Ismael, shoving Saiixek back. ‘And we will… not let you take… Him.’
Saiixek turned a slow circle and his horror was evident, even to those without augmentation. The natural order of the world had been overturned and the Master of Engines now realised he was in very real danger. The servitors were unarmed and individually were no match for highly trained, weaponised skitarii.
But they had overwhelming numbers on their side, and if violence ensued, neither Saiixek or his skitarii escort would leave here alive.
‘What have you done, Bondsman Locke?’ asked Saiixek. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus… What have you done?’
‘I didn’t do anything!’ protested Abrehem.
Ismael raised his mechanised arm above his head, the manipulator claw on the end clenched into an approximation of a fist.
And all through the Ark Mechanicus, tens of thousands of fists rose in support.
Microcontent 04
The Warhound was a swift hunter, an unseen killer on the ice. Amarok moved through the labyrinth of canyons with a silence that should have been impossible for such a huge machine, its heavy footfalls somehow making little or no sound as Gunnar Vintras wove a path through a glittering forest of crazily angled crystalline spires jutting from the ice and rock like slender stalagmites of diamond.
The Skinwalker lay back in the contoured couch of his Warhound, feeling the flex and release of his mechanised musculature, the acid-burn of exertion and the neutron winds whipping around his armoured carapace. He wore his silver hair shaved down to his skull, exposing wolf-eye tattoos surrounding the cerebral implant sockets in his neck. His actual eyes were closed, darting around behind the lids, and his sharpened teeth were bared in a feral snarl.
Amarok was a beautiful machine to pilot, built by craftsmen of a bygone age who cared about the weapons they built, not like the sunborn adepts of today who just stamped out inferior manufactorum-pressed copies of mechanical art.
It felt good to take his engine out onto a real hunting ground. Magos Dahan’s training halls aboard the Speranza were wide and expansive, but no substitute for walking on the surface of a real world. Vintras eased Amarok from a cautious stride to a slow lope, gradually feeding power from the reactor at the Warhound’s heart to its reverse-jointed legs of plasteel and fibre-bundle muscles.
He felt Amarok’s desire to be loosed, to sprint through this crystalline forest of glassy spires on the hunt, but he clamped his will down upon it.
‘Not yet, wildheart,’ he said, feeling the volatile core of the spirit baiting him through the crackling link of the Manifold. Ever since they’d entered what Mistress Tychon was calling the umbra, arcing ahead of the course to be followed by the plodding Land Leviathans, the Titan’s spirit had been restless. It didn’t like this world, and Vintras couldn’t blame it. There was something… off about Katen Venia, as though it was spitefully hoping to drag others into its imminent demise.
The auspex was a squalling mess of bounced returns from the crystalline spires surrounding him and crackling distortion caused by the umbra. He was relying on what Amarok’s external picters were telling him, walking by auspex-sight alone and bereft of any other sensory inputs.
Princeps of larger engines would be horrified at such a limited sphere of awareness, but Warhound princeps were cut from a different cloth, and Vintras relished this chance to pilot his engine so viscerally. He couldn’t see the Mechanicus Leviathans, Lupa Capitalina or Vilka beyond the canyon’s walls, but that suited Vintras just fine.
Ever since the Wintersun had opened fire on Canis Ulfrica, Vintras was in no hurry to walk in the Warlord’s shadow. These canyons were altogether too similar to the claustrophobic cavern runs of Beta Fortanis, and Vintras didn’t like to think of the Wintersun having any further reminders of that nightmarish battle. The Capitalina’s magos claimed the engine’s Manifold had been purged of data junk relating to that fight, but who really knew what ghost echoes lingered in the deep memory of a war machine as ancient and complex as a Warlord Titan?
No, best to keep clear of Lupa Capitalina for now.
His fingers flexed without conscious thought and the weapon mounts on his arms clattered as the threat auspex overlaid the topographical display with a red-hazed shimmer of threat returns. Autonomic reactions took over and Vintras slewed the Titan around, lowering the carapace and shrugging his weapon mounts to the fore.
Ammunition shunts fed explosive shells into the vulcan, while the heavy-duty capacitors of the turbolasers siphoned energy from the surging reactor. Vintras felt his arms swell with lethal power and the heat in his belly spread through his flesh-limbs.
Keeping the Titan moving, he panned the snarling, lupine snout of his engine from left to right, searching for targets or anything that might have provoked such a response. Vapour bleed from the melting nitrogen ice made visibility a joke, but Vintras wasn’t seeing anything hostile.
A few hundred metres away, a cluster of crystal spires crashed to the ground as the bedrock cracked open and they tore loose. Shards fell in glittering mineral rain, throwing back myriad reflections of his war-engine.
Vintras let out a pent-up breath. There was nothing out here but him.
‘Seismic activity,’ he said. ‘That’s all it was, my beauty. Falling spires and shifting rock.’
Boulders of ice fell from the lip of the canyon, and he danced his machine back to avoid the largest. The voids would spare him the worst of the impacts, but it never paid to antagonise a Titan’s spirit with needless damage. The ground cracked as the boulders landed, each one tens of metres across, and Vintras sidestepped away from the unstable ground.
He dismissed the threat auspex and pushed forwards through the crystal spires once more, satisfied there was nothing out there to cause him concern. He felt Amarok’s displeasure in the rumble of the engine core and the resistance in its limbs.
‘Easy there,’ he whispered. ‘There’s nothing out there.’
But still the Titan fought him, keeping its weapons armed and once again calling the threat auspex to the fore.
Vintras cancelled it. ‘Enough,’ he snapped. ‘You’re getting as jumpy as the Wintersun.’
The Manifold growled at his casual dismissal, and he felt the great machine’s ire in a surge of painful feedback through his spinal implant. Amarok was not an engine to patronise, its spirit that of a lone predator, the killer that lurks in the darkness and strikes without warning.
Such an entity did not jump at shadows, and he had been foolish to forget that.
‘You want to hunt?’ he said. ‘Then let’s hunt. Full auspex sweep.’
Katen Venia’s surface was painfully bright, even through the protective filters of Roboute’s helmet. Cold, ultraviolet-tinged illumination fell in shimmering, auroral bands, the red light of the star shifted along the visible spectrum by a cocktail of released gases surging in the temporary atmosphere that imparted a shimmering, undersea quality to their surroundings. Towering mountains of frozen nitrogen were visible through the drifting banks of vapour streaming from their jagged peaks as the heat from the dying star stripped the icy crust from the planet’s surface.
Dazzling refractions of variegated light shone through the prisms of the ice mountains, and Roboute had never seen anything as grandly terrible in all his life. He felt as if he had been shrunk to microscopic size and was navigating a passage through the grooves and ridges on the surface of a cut-glass decanter. His earlier disappointment at the planet’s appearance had melted away as surely as the nitrogen icecaps in the face of what lay beyond the Mechanicus landing fields.
This was the death of a planet, and like war, it was a beautiful thing to see from a distance.
There was majesty in this global annihilation event, an inhuman level of destruction whereby mountain ranges were being abraded before his very eyes, continents unseated from their molten beds and the world’s metallic core being rendered down to its composite elements.
Up close, it was even more beautiful and even more dangerous.
Waterfalls of liquid nitrogen poured down razor-edged canyons. Boiling lakes expanded with every surge of melting chemically-rich ice then shrank back as they bled toxic vapour into the void. Under colossal geological upheaval, the planet was undergoing stresses it had not known since its birth in the star’s powerful gravitational tug-of-war. From orbit the planet’s crust had been a reticulated mess of random scoring where tectonic plates had been ripped apart. On the surface that translated to gorges hundreds of kilometres wide and who knew how many deep.
The planet was in a heightened state of activity, and only the precision of Magos Blaylock’s calculations – married to inloads from adepts of the Collegium Geologica – had allowed the fleet’s Fabricatus Locum to plot a route to the Tomioka. The snaking, zig-zagging course offered the forces on the ground the best chance of reaching their goal, but Blaylock had been quick to point out that it was based purely on statistical probability rather than actual measurements.
An inset slate on the control panel fizzed with static, but had just enough resolution to show the position of the grav-sled, together with the corridor of acceptably stable ground they were to follow. Widened out to maximum zoom, that corridor was still frighteningly narrow and allowed little margin for error. Roboute didn’t know what might happen if Blaylock’s calculations were awry or he strayed from the marked corridor, and was in no hurry to find out.
Occasionally, they saw the remnants of servitor drones, buried in the sides of glaciers or smashed to a thousand pieces on the valley floor. Smoke trailed from their shattered canopies, and Roboute tried not to notice the ruptured bodies that spilled from them. A brief inload from Linya Tychon had mentioned an umbra of interference and distortion centred on the Tomioka, which went some way to explaining why they’d seen so many downed drones and were forced to rely on the workings of Tarkis Blaylock instead of precise route information.
The Tabularium pounded the ice and rock with its multiple iron feet as it trudged after them like a relentless city that had managed to uproot itself from its foundations and give chase. The other Land Leviathans were arranged behind it, nose to tail, a caravan of steel that reached back nearly five kilometres. The Cadian armoured vehicles, a mix of transports and tanks, clustered around the mobile temples like scavenger creatures stalking a dying herbivore, and Roboute was glad at least one other element of this expedition would likely be feeling a sense of amazement at this exploration of a new world.
Even over the enormous height of the Tabularium, Roboute could see the loping form of the alpha engine of Legio Sirius. Lupa Capitalina held station at the centre of the convoy, a mobile fortress protecting the Leviathans with its city-levelling firepower.
‘Can you see the Warhounds yet?’ asked Adara. ‘My da once said he saw one on Konor, but it ran off before he got a proper look at it.’
Before now, Roboute would have poured scorn on the idea of a Titan running off, but having seen the speed with which Amarok and Vilka had deployed from their coffin ships, he was less inclined to laugh at Adara’s tale. Even the speed of the Warlord had shocked them, and the impatient brays of its warhorn echoed from the walls of the glittering ice valley.
‘No,’ answered Roboute, craning his neck around. ‘I haven’t, but that doesn’t surprise me. Warhounds are Scout Titans, ambush predators, and they don’t like you seeing them until it’s too late.’
Adara nodded, but still kept looking.
‘Your father is certainly well travelled,’ said Pavelka, her voice sounding in Roboute’s helmet via subvocalised vibrations. ‘Calth, Iax, Konor… Is there any part of Ultramar he has not visited?’
Pavelka’s dripping sarcasm was evident, even over the helm-vox and the thrumming bass note of the grav-sled’s repulsors.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘Ilanna’s just teasing you,’ said Roboute, knowing how defensive the lad got if anyone dared to question the truth of his father’s tales.
‘Well she shouldn’t,’ said Adara. ‘My da served as an armsman to Inquisitor Apollyon on Armageddon, and you don’t go mouthing off about someone like that.’
Roboute knew Pavelka wouldn’t be able to resist pulling that particular declaration apart, and gave the control column a shake to discourage her from picking holes in it.
‘Easy, Roboute!’ cried Adara, gripping the restraint bar on the door.
The ground beneath the grav-sled was a mixture of frozen nitrogen and bare, metallic rock, like the surface of an oil-streaked glacier. The sled’s repulsor field reacted badly to patches of exotic metals and the ride was bumpier than Roboute would have liked. The controls were oversized to accommodate the inherent clumsiness in void-suit gloves, but even so, it felt like the machine was fighting him every step of the way, slewing left and right despite his best attempts to keep level.
‘I can control the sled through my MIU if you would prefer,’ said Pavelka. ‘It appears you are having some difficulty, captain.’
‘No,’ said Roboute, wrestling with the control column. ‘I’m fine taking us in.’
Their route was winding a path through a steep-sided canyon that Roboute’s eyes were telling him rose to around a hundred metres or so, but was probably at least a couple of kilometres. The eye was easily tricked into forming manageable scales when denied any quantifiable points of reference. When he’d first eased the sled into the mountains, his mind had reeled at the sheer vastness of each canyon’s ice-blue walls, and without the measurable scale of the landing fields, it was impossible to define distances or perspective with any reliability.
‘How soon till we reach the crashed ship?’ asked Adara, his neck craned back as far as the gorget arrangement on his helmet’s collar would allow. Roboute risked narrowing the magnification of the slate, but gave up looking when the screeching, squalling distortion pattern didn’t let up. Only the slender thread of Blaylock’s route through the labyrinth remained unwavering.
‘Impossible to say through this interference,’ answered Pavelka, reading the same information instantly. Even through the imperfections of the vox-units, her excitement was palpable. ‘According to our distance travelled, we should be within sight of the Tomioka within seven minutes, assuming the current rate of advance continues.’
‘And assuming I don’t crash us,’ said Roboute.
‘A possibility I did not care to raise.’
‘Listen,’ said Roboute. ‘A grav-sled isn’t a precision instrument of manoeuvre, but I think I’m finally getting its measure. It just takes a little finesse and a little nerve.’
‘I suppose how much nerve is required depends on where one is sitting.’
Adara sniggered. ‘And Mistress Tychon said the Mechanicus don’t have a sense of humour…’
‘She’s right,’ snapped Roboute. ‘They don’t.’
Despite Pavelka’s commentary on his piloting skills, Roboute steered them with greater confidence with every passing metre. His Ultramarian ethic would not let him attempt a task without then mastering it, and curbing the vagaries of the grav-sled’s control was no exception.
Their course evened out over the next few kilometres, and as Roboute eased around a sheer spur of violet-tinged ice that shed streamers of vapour like an industrial smokestack, the valley widened noticeably towards a cascade of smoking liquid nitrogen. It poured down through a fissure that glittered in the blue-shifted light, before vanishing into a gaping crevasse that cut the valley almost in two.
Roboute guessed the crevasse was at least thirty metres wide.
According to Blaylock’s path, the Tomioka lay on the opposite side.
And the Black Templars, he thought, trying to keep a lid on his irritation.
Where the crevasse didn’t quite reach the valley walls, cascading spumes of freezing gases collected in swirling eddies and whirlpools of shimmering liquid.
‘Will the Land Leviathans be able to get across that?’ asked Adara.
‘Not a chance,’ said Roboute. ‘Though the Tabularium might fall in and wedge itself tight to make a bridge for the others.’
‘You think there’s room enough for us to go round the edges?’
‘Just barely,’ answered Pavelka, blink-clicking measurement datum points and exloading them to the Mechanicus pioneer vehicles behind them.
‘Well, the Black Templars may have beaten us to the Tomioka, but I’ll be damned if anyone else is getting there before us,’ said Roboute, hauling the grav-sled around towards the edge of the valley, where vortices of nitrogen translated from gas to liquid and back again with alarming frequency.
The pitch of the grav-sled’s engines increased, and the repulsor field skittered at the abrupt change in ground density. Roboute heard Pavelka mutter a whispered prayer to the Machine-God and felt her subtle imprecation to the engines’ magnetic field compensating for the unusual terrain.
