‘As soon as I saw that Captain Surcouf’s Marque was a forgery, I knew I had to ratify it immediately,’ said Kotov. ‘The expedition’s manifest was to be entered in Martian Records, and the Montes Analyticae would spot the discrepancy long before the fleet was ready to depart.’
‘You falsified the records,’ said Blaylock.
‘I amended them,’ corrected Kotov. ‘Mister Surcouf’s physical Letter of Marque may be counterfeit, but so far as Imperial records are concerned, he is a legitimate rogue trader, and has been since his arrival on Anohkin.’
‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered Blaylock. ‘You cannot do this.’
‘I am an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ said Kotov. ‘I can do whatever I want.’
From the descending orbital spiral of the Renard’s shuttle, the surface of Hypatia appeared as rust brown smudges interspersed with upthrust masses of titanic mountain ranges and rapidly swelling oceanic bodies. Atmospheric seed-augurs revealed the atmosphere to be breathable, if only comfortably so for short periods of time, and the geological core to be in a state of ongoing flux. The surface was tectonically active, but stable enough to sustain the industrial harvest fleet descending to replenish the Speranza’s virtually exhausted supply of raw materials.
Linya kept a background inload from the shuttle’s pilot compartment filtering through her field of vision as she made her way to the giant cargo shuttle’s loading hold. The internal crew spaces of the trans-atmospheric ship were cramped, as one would expect of a vessel that was little more than a pilot’s compartment mag-locked and bolted to a heat-shielded warehouse. They were clean and well-maintained, each junction of corridors clearly marked and efficiently laid out. Here and there, in alcoves that appeared like shared secrets, she found curiously random trinkets in subtly lit display cases: a folded flag from Espandor, a Mechanicus commendation, a Cadian medal and other fleeting glimpses into the character of the crew.
It was a personal touch on a working vessel she found quaintly archaic, yet wonderfully human.
The Renard’s shuttle was a mid-sized carrier, capable of carrying tens of thousands of metric tonnes of cargo and was clearly kept in a well above average state of repair. Linya expected no less from a man like Roboute Surcouf, and she smiled as she remembered his clumsy overtures in the wake of the dinner in the Cadian officers’ mess.
She did not regret what she had said to him, after all she had not lied. Baseline humans without cognitive augmentation were almost transparent in the interest they held for members of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Artificially evolved thought processes made it next to impossible for many tech-priests to relate to the petty concerns and levels of importance humanity placed on meaningless ritual and unnecessary social intercourse.
Linya had fought to hold onto the core essence of her birth species as she rose through the Cult Mechanicus, but with every implant, every sacrifice of an organic organ or limb, it became a more and more difficult task. She knew that many in the Martian priesthood considered her an aberration, a throwback to the earliest days of transhumanism, where even the slightest alteration to the human body-plan or cybernetic addition to cognition was viewed with technophobic horror.
She read a change in attitude of the shuttle and brought her inloads to the fore of her visual field, reading the planet’s mass, rotational period, perihelion, aphelion, equatorial diameter, axial tilt and atmospheric composition.
Volcanic activity on Hypatia’s closest moon, the erratically orbiting Isidore, was forcing a course correction, something Emil Nader was managing with only the smallest expenditure of fuel. Bloated refinery tenders hung in geostationary orbit around Isidore, their deep-core siphon rigs draining a dozen underground caverns of their vast lakes of promethium.
The second moon, Synesius, traced an elliptical orbit at the farthest edge of the planet’s gravitational envelope, an inert ball of rock without any rotation of its own. A hundred Mechanicus scarifiers had landed on its surface, tearing claws the size of hab-towers breaking its lithosphere open for the Land Leviathans to strip its upper mantle of usable materials.
But the real prize was Hypatia itself. By her father’s reckoning, the planet was in the early stages of its development, the crust still malleable enough to permit the digging out of its precious mineral and chemical resources with relative ease. The entirety of the Speranza’s harvest fleet had been despatched to the surface of Hypatia and its two moons, as Archmagos Kotov wanted this resupply effort undertaken with maximum speed and minimum delay on their journey to Telok’s forge world.
With Moonchild and Wrathchild keeping station in high orbit and Mortis Voss assuming a rotating helical course around the three vessels, the Speranza anchored in low orbit, at an altitude Linya felt was dangerously close to the planet’s atmospheric boundary and fluctuating gravity envelope. Magos Saiixek was working his engine crews to the limits of endurance to keep the ship’s trajectory stable, but Magos Blaylock had calculated that the benefit to the bulk haulers’ turnaround speeds would more than compensate for the level of risk.
Linya matched what the shuttle’s active surveyor arrays were telling her of Hypatia with the data Galatea had exloaded from the Tomioka’s cogitators, finding only the acceptable level of discrepancies one might expect between readings taken thousands of years apart. Linya did not trust Galatea one iota, but the data had so far offered her no reason to doubt its claim of simply acting as a conduit for the vast reams of information. She shuddered as she remembered its manipulator arm tracing down her cheek, like an obscene parody of a lover’s touch. The machine intelligence claimed to be sentient and thus ‘alive’, so could that mean it harboured intentions towards her that might be considered unnatural?
She shook off the loathsome thought as the cramped, steel-panelled corridor opened into the vaulted immensity of the cargo hold. She read the noospheric data being shed by the shuttle’s systems, a curious blend of awe mixed with fearful reverence and smiled at their conflicted emissions.
The shuttle carried no cargo, but its hold was a bustling mass of activity nonetheless.
A hundred or more tech-priests bearing the canidae insignia of Legio Sirius clustered around the threatening mass of metal, ceramite and iron that stood shackled to the centre of the cargo deck like a dangerous wild animal in the hold of a big game hunter. Hostile binaric code burbled from its augmitters and Linya felt a thrill of danger at the sight of it.
Even chained to the deck for transit, Amarok was a magnificently lethal engine of war.
Princeps Vintras directed the work of a dozen tech-priests and servitors as they finished the repainting of the Warhound’s armoured topside. The damage the engine had suffered on Katen Venia was almost completely repaired, and Vintras made sure that all evidence of its wounding was erased.
The Titan’s warhorn blared, echoing through the cargo deck, and Linya adjusted her aural implants to filter out the most gruesome war-horrors embedded in its howl.
‘I take it the senior princeps have settled their differences?’ asked Vitali, approaching along a gantry perpendicular to the one she stood upon.
‘So it would appear,’ said Linya.
The Manifold had been alight for days following the altercation between Eryks Skálmöld and Arlo Luth, the fury of their confrontation bleeding into neighbouring cogitation networks and causing systems throughout the Speranza to fuse and spit with borrowed aggression. Whatever had driven them to conflict had apparently been resolved, as the renewed vigour with which the two princeps had coordinated the Legio’s ongoing training schedule was masterful.
‘I don’t know about you, daughter,’ said Vitali, clapping his hands with glee, ‘but I am looking forward to walking the surface of Hypatia in a god-machine.’
Linya’s father’s enthusiasm for their planned trip to the surface aboard Amarok was taking decades off him, making him sound more like an adept only into his second century. He put an arm around her shoulder and she felt the warm rush of his affec
tion course through her floodstream. She remembered Roboute asking her if she loved her father and the faintly dismissive answer she had given him.
Of course she loved her father; at times like this his irrepressible enthusiasm for new things was a salutary reminder of what it meant to be human. She tried to hold to the feeling, but the toxic stream of wrathful binary from the secured Titan made it hard to hold onto any thoughts save those of conquest.
‘It’s going to be cramped in there,’ she reminded him. ‘A Warhound isn’t designed to carry passengers, and we will be expected to carry out the tasks of the crew members we are replacing.’
‘Yes, yes, I am aware of that,’ said Vitali, pulling her close. ‘And it will be a grand adventure, I’m sure of it.’
Linya smiled and nodded in agreement. ‘Though hopefully less eventful than the excursion to Katen Venia.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Vitali. ‘And you are sure you are recovered, my dear?’
‘I am, yes. The implants that blew out in the data overload have all been replaced, and the physical injuries have healed.’
‘I didn’t just mean the physical effects, Linya,’ said Vitali. ‘You almost died down there. Ave Deus Mechanicus, I don’t want to think about you being hurt, it turns my blood cold.’
‘Your oil/blood mix is maintained at precisely thirty-eight degrees.’
‘An organic turn of phrase, but you know what I mean,’ said Vitali. ‘You should never have been aboard that ship, and I should have known it was going to be trouble. If even half the stories the old logs tell of Telok are true, then there were bound to be automated defences. You shouldn’t even be descending to the surface of Hypatia.’
‘Why not? You are.’
‘Ah, yes, but I’m an old man in the last hurrah of his already over-extended life,’ said Vitali. ‘Who would deny me this last chance to walk a newborn world as part of a Titan’s crew?’
‘No-one,’ said Linya, inloading the shuttle’s final approach to the surface.
‘Ah,’ said Vitali, reading the same information. ‘We’re here.’
The Processional Way that led from the Adamant Ciborium was a superhighway of noospheric light, a library and a transit route all in one. Kotov found introspection in the cool darkness of the Ciborium, but when he wished to revel in all that his order had achieved over the millennia, it was to the Processional Way that he came. Vaulted and coffered with gold and steel, the history of the Mechanicus unfolded above him in vast murals with none of the subtlety of Claeissens’s work
This route through the Speranza was not about subtlety, but statement.
Towering statues of bronze and gold-veined marble reached into the vaults above, where gene-spliced cherubs and servo-skulls drifted in lazy arcs, burbling soft binaric hymnals. Shimmering veils of light from the tessellated windows of stained glass fell in oil-shimmer bands of colour illuminating the votive strips of doctrina paper attached to the statues’ bases.
A six-legged palanquin followed Kotov as he made his way from the Adamant Ciborium, its mono-tasked servitor driver periodically requesting him to board, but the archmagos felt the need to make this journey on foot. Or as close to on foot as a being with little more than a disembodied head and a truncated spinal cord could achieve. In the days since his audience with Surcouf, Kotov had remained ensconced within his robes of office. As the time of their arrival around Telok’s forge world approached, Kotov knew it was time to fully assume the mantle of an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Beside him, Tarkis Blaylock matched his mechanised pace exactly, though his attached retinue of stunted servitors wheezed and puffed with the effort of keeping up. Between them, they had just orchestrated the final repair schedules for the Speranza, allocating resources and work-shifts as need and priority dictated. For a ship as complex as the Ark Mechanicus – and with their materiel resources still a morass of unknown variables – the task would have been onerous to anyone but senior adepts with high-functioning hexamathic implants.
Lines of power squirmed over the floor’s hexagonal tiles at his every footfall, spreading word of his presence and passing their calculations into the ship’s network. In return, Kotov felt the ship’s wounded heart, seeing Galatea’s enmeshed presence in its every vital network.
‘You will be whole once again,’ said Kotov. ‘And free.’
‘Archmagos?’ asked Blaylock.
Kotov shook his head. ‘Just thinking aloud, Tarkis.’
Blaylock nodded, but said nothing. The business with Surcouf had reached past Blaylock’s normal, logical detachment from mortal concerns to provoke genuine anger; Kotov knew his Fabricatus Locum was still processing the reasons for his allowing Surcouf to escape punishment.
Kotov stopped at the foot of a grand statue, exactly four hundred and ninety-six metres tall and rendered in polished silver-steel and glittering chrome.
‘Magos Zimmen,’ said Kotov. ‘Originator of Hexamathic Geometry. A personal hero of mine, you know. I wrote numerous monographs on her work when I was first inducted to the Cult Mechanicus.’
‘I am aware of that, archmagos,’ answered Blaylock. ‘I have, of course, inloaded them and factored them into my own work.’
‘It seems strange to think of a time before hexamathics, don’t you think? We rely on it so heavily now. It is part of every binaric code structure, part of every communication, yet we take it for granted, as though we will never lose it.’
‘Nor shall we, its usage is incorporated into every database.’
Kotov looked up into Zimmen’s stoic countenance. ‘We are so sure of ourselves, Tarkis,’ he said. ‘Yes, we have encoded much of our data, but all it might take is one catastrophe for us to forget all we have learned. The Age of Strife nearly wiped us out, erased so much of what our species had achieved so thoroughly – one might be tempted to imagine it was a deliberate act of technological vandalism.’
‘We have learned from that,’ said Blaylock. ‘Our archives are scattered, multiple redundancies and duplicates exist on every forge world.’
‘Trust me, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘I know how easily a forge world can be lost better than anyone. I remember a saying from Old Earth that said civilisation was one meal away from barbarism. I believe we are little better.’
Kotov walked on as the servitor atop the palanquin broadcast another boarding request.
‘Hexamathics is a good example,’ he said. ‘We take it for granted, but what if the STC to construct the implants that allow our brains to process the calculations was lost? Vast swathes of our current means of encrypted communication and data transfer would be rendered incomprehensible at a stroke. You and I are exchanging and updating our recent work-flow patterns as we speak on higher planes of noospheric transference, but remove our hexamathic implants and those data-streams would become unintelligible gibberish little better than scrapcode.’
‘As you say, archmagos,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘One might then ask why you risked a starship as valuable as the Speranza on so uncertain a venture as this? The battle against the eldar vessel has shown it to be a repository of technologies to which we do not yet have access.’
‘You mean why I risked it on the word of a fraudster like Surcouf?’
‘That is indeed my meaning.’
Kotov paused in his walk and said, ‘Because I had become guilty of overweening pride, Tarkis. The Omnissiah in His wisdom saw fit to punish me for my hubris in believing that I could lift our order out of the darkness and into a new golden age by my intellect alone. My forge worlds were lost, my reputation in tatters. My fall from grace reminded me that without the Omnissiah, we are nothing; apes grubbing about in the dirt for scraps of an earlier civilisation. By following the mindstep signs the Machine-God leaves for us, we draw closer to the singularity that is the pinnacle of our aspirations, when the Machine-God becomes one with Mankind and elevates us to the level of super-intelligences.’
‘And you believe that Surcouf is one of those signs?’
&nbs
p; ‘He has to be,’ said Kotov, exloading the data-footprint the rogue trader had left in the Manifold in the years leading up to the expedition’s beginning. ‘His trading fleets were operating on the galactic fringes for years before he received a commission from Magos Alhazen to travel to the Arax system.’
‘Magos Alhazen of Sinus Sabeus? My mentor?’ asked Blaylock in astonishment.
‘The very same,’ replied Kotov.
‘The Speranza skirted the edges of the Arax system en route to the Halo Scar,’ said Blaylock, calling up the route calculations of Azuramagelli and Linya Tychon. ‘What was the nature of the commission?’
Kotov stopped as they approached the cliff-like bulkhead that separated the Processional Way from the more functional areas of the vast starship. Half a kilometre high, its geometric patterns were idealised representations of the golden ratio, and at its centre was a colossal Cog Mechanicus in coal-dark iron and glittering chrome.
‘A routine outsource request to bring back mineral samples from an abandoned Techsorcist outpost on a planet designated as Seren Ayelet. Surcouf’s ships duly returned with the requested samples, but six months later Roboute Surcouf made contact with my Martian holdings with news of something his ships had found within the system’s main asteroid belt.’
‘The distress beacon from the Tomioka’s saviour pod.’
‘Just so, Tarkis, just so,’ said Kotov. ‘And you are certainly aware of how statistically unlikely the odds are of a saviour pod being recovered in wilderness space, let alone within a dense asteroid belt. That the beacon survived transit of the Halo Scar was nothing short of miraculous and its discovery no less so. That it came to light in service of a task set by your late mentor was a link in the chain that stretched any notions of coincidence or happenstance beyond breaking point. The pieces were beginning to fall into place. I had the Speranza, a vessel capable of breaching the Halo Scar, and a stargazer whose cartography was showing marked discrepancies in the stellar topography of the very region I was to traverse. Truly, the Omnissiah could have given me no clearer signs.’