He could see Agathe’s physical form, which was short and slightly rounded, as well as reading her biometrics and the electrical field densities of her subtle augmetics. Her noospheric modifications flickered and tiny geysers of data light streamed above her head.
The second figure was Princeps Sharaq.
‘My princeps?’ said Agathe, startled by his sudden vocalisation. ‘Do you require anything?’
‘Hmmm? No, Agathe, I was just thinking aloud.’
‘Congratulations on another successful engagement, Indias,’ said Sharaq.
‘Thank you, Kel,’ said Cavalerio. ‘Did you see how I took down the second Warlord?’
Sharaq smiled, and Cavalerio read the genuine pleasure his friend took in the accomplishment. ‘I saw it, my princeps. Masterful.’
‘I know,’ said Cavalerio without arrogance. ‘I am faster and more cohesive in my command than ever before. I merely think an order and the engine responds. Data streams into me straight from the Manifold, which increases my reaction and response times by an average of nine point seven per cent. That’s more than the difference between life and death in an engine fight.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Sharaq. ‘You’re adjusting well, then?’
‘I am, Kel, I am. My days are full. I fight simulated engagements every day, though only Agathe watches me now. Between my battles and surgery, Princeps Kasim comes to check on my progress, and we share stories of our glorious Legio’s history.’
‘And the casket?’ asked Sharaq. ‘You don’t miss… well, flesh?’
Cavalerio hesitated before answering. ‘It was difficult,’ he admitted at last. ‘For the longest time I thought I would go mad in here, but Agathe has helped many a princeps adjust to his new life. And, as time went on, I began to understand that this was what I was destined for.’
‘Destined?’
‘Yes, Kel, destined. I don’t know why I resisted immersion for all those years. I link with the Manifold and it’s so much closer than it was before. When I commanded Victorix Magna I could feel what she felt, but it was borrowed sensation. Now I am the engine. This shouldn’t be the last resort of an aging or injured princeps, this should be the standard method of command for all the bigger engines.’
‘I think you might have a hard time convincing some of the die-hards of that.’
‘Not if they knew what I know,’ said Cavalerio. ‘But what say we dispense with the small talk and discuss the real reason for your visit?’
Sharaq nodded, circling the tank with the awe of one in the presence of greatness, and Cavalerio read his unease in his increased heart rate and spiking alpha waves.
‘It’s all right, Kel,’ said Cavalerio. ‘You don’t need to feel guilty. You did what you had to do and I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t.’
Sharaq stopped his circling and knelt before the casket, placing his hand on the warm glass of the tank. Cavalerio floated to the front, his flesh marbled and glossy, his features all but obscured by the complex bionics that grafted him to the machinery of his life-support. Only an inch of toughened glass separated the two men, but an anatomy’s worth of augmetics created a gulf between their humanity.
‘I don’t feel guilty,’ said Sharaq. ‘I know I did the right thing. You weren’t fit to command the Legio then and, despite your progress, I still don’t think you’re ready. Soon, but not yet.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘I need your help, Stormlord,’ said Sharaq, ‘and I need your experience. I fear I am not cut from the same cloth as you. Leadership is in your blood, but not in mine.’
‘Then speak,’ ordered Cavalerio. ‘I may not be Princeps Senioris, but I am still your friend.’
The words were meant to comfort Sharaq, but only seemed to wound him. He looked over at Agathe and said, ‘Perhaps we might speak privately, my princeps?’
‘Agathe is my famulous and anything you have to say to me can be said in front of her.’
‘Very well, Stormlord,’ said Sharaq. ‘You won’t have failed to notice that you haven’t been linked to any ports with outside access during your recovery. The medicae felt it would hinder your adjustment for you to be inloaded with an excess of data.’
‘A decision that, with hindsight, I applaud,’ said Cavalerio. ‘So tell me, what’s been happening beyond our fortress? Have Mortis been taken to task for their violation of our territory?’
Sharaq shook his head. ‘No, my lord,’ he said, ‘they have not. The Princeps Conciliatus have been appraised of the facts and they have issued a summons, but both the Fabricator General and Princeps Camulos ignore it.’
‘A Conciliatus summons and a rift between the Legios? Ignored? Madness!’
‘All of Mars may well have gone mad, my princeps,’ agreed Sharaq.
‘What do you mean?’
Sharaq shared a look with Agathe and said, ‘The situation on Mars has deteriorated almost to the point of open warfare. Disaster strikes at the Mechanicum from all sides and we are petitioned daily for our engines to walk.’
‘Petitioned by whom?’
‘I have received missives from no less than seventeen forges, all begging us to initiate an execution. With your permission, my princeps, I should like to inload your casket with the latest updates on the current tactical situation.’
‘Of course, Kel,’ said Cavalerio. ‘Immediately.’
Sharaq said nothing and didn’t appear to move, but Cavalerio felt a rush of data as his fellow princeps noospherically unlocked the feeds that were part of the Martian network and which fed directly into the smart liquid of his casket.
‘Blood of the Omnissiah,’ hissed Cavalerio as the data permeated his mind via informational osmosis. In an instant, he drank in the terrible events of the Death of Innocence caused by the hateful scrapcode, the spate of catastrophic machine failures and the rising tide of violence erupting all across the surface of Mars.
He saw bloodshed as forges went to war and old feuds were re-ignited. He saw opportunistic territorial grabs, spiteful acts of vengeance and hungry snatches for a rival’s knowledge. The drums of battle were beating all over Mars, stirring the bellicose hearts of man, and spurring the looming presence of civil war ever closer.
It saddened him to realise that, a race apart though they might be, the Mechanicum were just as prone to human foibles as their unmodified brethren.
‘And this scrapcode attack came just as Mortis walked on Ascraeus Mons?’
‘We caught the first spurts of it, I think,’ said Sharaq. ‘It was fragmentary and dispersed, and Zeth’s noospheric upgrades saved us from getting hit as hard as some others, but Legio Fortidus and Legio Agravides are gone. Their reactors went critical and took their entire fortress and a good chunk of the Erebus Montes with them.’
Cavalerio digested the information without comment, though it grieved him to think of two allied Legios lost to so ignominious a fate. He reviewed the data he’d been fed impassively, sifting through the morass of contradictory communiqués, orders, requests, petitions, demands and propaganda flying between the forges. Factions were already forming, fragile alliances drawn along the lines of the tired old Omnissiah schism.
Blurts of cant circled the planet, some demanding an end to the union of Mars and Terra, while others urged all Mars to cleave more tightly to the bosom of humanity’s birth rock. Worse, much of it had gone off-world, spreading like a plague on departing ships or within astropathic visions cast across the void to the Mechanicum contingents accompanying the Expedition Fleets throughout the galaxy.
‘What’s all this talk of Horus Lupercal?’ asked Cavalerio, reading the binary version of the first primarch’s name time and time again. ‘What does the Warmaster have to do with any of this?’
‘We’re not sure, my princeps,’ said Sharaq. ‘The factions advocating the split from Terra seem to be championing the Warmaster as their deliverer from the Emperor. It’s hard to make much sense of it, their code is so corrupt it’s litt
le more than binary screams of the Warmaster’s name.’
‘Has word of this reached Terra?’
‘The inter-system vox is erratic, but Adept Maximal has apparently made intermittent contact with the Council of Terra.’
‘And what do they make of all this?’
‘It sounds like they’re as confused as us, my princeps,’ said Sharaq, taking a deep breath before continuing. ‘Something bad has happened in the Istvaan system, something to do with the Astartes, but we can’t get any hard facts.’
‘But what of Mars?’ pressed Cavalerio, ‘what do they say about Mars?’
‘The Mechanicum is told to quell the unrest or the Legions will do it for them.’
THE MAG-LEV MADE good time through the southern reaches of the Tharsis uplands, skirting the edge of the pallidus and passing through a number of storms of wind-blown particulate on its journey eastwards. Dalia found the sight of the billowing ash strangely uplifting, and spent hours watching the spiralling vortices streaming down the length of the carriages.
She watched the dust rolling on and on throughout the landscape and envied its freedom to roam, blown hither and thither without direction by the winds. Increasingly she felt as though her life was just like the mag-lev, travelling upon a fixed track, guided inexorably forward to an inevitable destination. The notion of free will and choice seemed alien and strange to her, as though her brain was merely responding to external stimuli and she had no choice but to obey.
They saw little of their fellow passengers during the journey, save for the occasional awkward passing in the corridors to and from the ablutions cubicles or food dispensers. Dalia recognised most of them as low-level adepts on errands for their masters, servitors on automatic reassignment or migrant labourers moving to another forge in the hope of securing work. Perhaps three hundred souls travelled with them, but no one paid them any mind, a fact for which Dalia was absurdly grateful.
The thrill of venturing beyond the boundaries of the forge had worn thin for their little group after a few hours, and they had fallen into the strange silence of travellers on a long journey with nothing to help pass the time. The prospect of seeing one of the otherworldly pallidus border towns had excited them, but even that had proven something of a letdown.
As the mag-lev had approached Ash Border, they all roused themselves to see what one of these frontier towns looked like, for none of them had ventured beyond the hives of Mars’ more populated regions.
Though Rho-mu 31 claimed not to be expecting any trouble, Dalia read his threat auspex switch to active as they came within range of the settlement’s network antenna. She didn’t mention that fact to the others.
Ash Border had proved to be both exotic and slightly dull at the same time, with dusty ore silos, rusted salvage barns and tall drilling machinery dominating the skyline. But with the memory of a Mechanicum forge still bright in their minds, the minor industrial complex of Ash Border seemed small and underwhelming.
The inhabitants were sullen-faced men and women with weather-beaten faces and clothes scoured identical by coarse ash. They offered no welcome and disappeared back to their ramshackle dwellings as soon as their cargo was unloaded by a handful of archaic lifter-servitors.
Dune Town lived up to its name and proved to be no less prosaic, with even more outmoded servitors unloading the allocated inventory before the mag-lev set off towards Crater Edge.
By now they had been travelling for a day and a half. Tiredness was beginning to tell and sleep was hard to come by. Though the ride was smooth, the compartment’s seats had been designed with functional practicality in mind rather than comfort.
None of them had been able to muster much enthusiasm to watch Zouche’s projection of the view from the driver’s compartment as they approached Crater Edge, but when the mag-lev halted at the raised dock, it was quickly evident that something was different.
The place was abandoned. The dwellings were empty and the streets deserted, but it was impossible to tell whether the inhabitants had been driven away or left of their own volition.
The mag-lev was on an automated schedule, so the mystery went unexplained, and the mining supplies allocated for the township remained in the snaking transport’s holds as it pulled away.
No sooner had Crater Edge vanished into the dust and haze than Dalia felt a weight she hadn’t even been aware of lift from her shoulders, as though some creeping sickness lingered around the township. The place had just felt… wrong.
Not the wrongness of disease or death, but a gurgling hiss of wet code-laughter she caught drifting on the airwaves.
Red Gorge was similarly deserted, the strange whispering code ghosting around it as well. Dalia caught Rho-mu 31 twitching as he heard it too: an insistent scratching that irritated the corners of the mind like an embedded flea.
She caught his eye as the mag-lev pulled away and they saw each other’s awareness of the bad code on the air.
Rho-mu 31 shook his head and she took his meaning clearly enough. Say nothing.
At last the mag-lev began the approach to the jagged line of peaks that separated the Tharsis uplands from the magnificent expanse of the Syria Planum. After a long, looping journey southwards, the mag-lev turned north to begin the slow climb over the upthrust spires of rock pushed up and over one another in an ongoing geological collision. The skies beyond the escarpment were dark and shot through with scarlet lightning, as though a great firestorm was brewing.
It had been a long journey and the sight of the two deserted townships had unsettled everyone. They had all heard tales of settlements abandoned when the ore or whatever had originally drawn the settlers there had dried up, but Red Gorge and Crater Edge hadn’t felt abandoned, they had felt empty, as though the people there had just vanished. Gone in a heartbeat.
‘Perhaps they were pressganged?’ suggested Severine. ‘I’ve heard of that. A forge master isn’t going to meet his quota and sends his Protectors out into the wastelands to capture more people to work in their forges.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Caxton. ‘That’s just scare stories.’
‘Is it?’ challenged Severine. ‘How do you know?’
‘I just do, all right?’
‘Oh, well I feel better already.’
‘What do you say, Rho-mu 31?’ asked Zouche in a tone of doom-laden theatrics. ‘Has Adept Zeth ever sent you off to procure slaves to toil in her volcanic forge?’
‘From time to time,’ admitted the Protector.
That shut them all up.
‘You’re joking, right?’ said Caxton. ‘Tell me you’re joking.’
‘I am Mechanicum,’ said Rho-mu 31. ‘We never joke.’
Dalia looked into the green orbs of Rho-mu 31’s eyes, and though they were devoid of anything resembling humanity, she saw the wry amusement written in his electrical field. She smiled at the horrified expressions on her friends’ faces and turned away so as not to spoil Rho-mu 31’s fun.
‘That’s… that’s terrible,’ said Severine. ‘The Mechanicum uses slaves?’ was Caxton’s disgusted comment.
‘I thought more of you, Rho-mu 31,’ said Zouche. ‘I thought more of Adept Zeth.’
When he judged the silence had gone on long enough, Rho-mu 31 leaned menacingly towards them and said, ‘Got you.’
A moment’s stunned silence followed Rho-mu 31’s words, and then the tension in the compartment was suddenly, explosively, relieved by hysterical laughter.
‘That wasn’t funny,’ said Caxton, between laughing and wiping tears from his eyes.
‘No,’ agreed Severine. ‘You shouldn’t say things like that.’
‘What? Can’t I make a joke?’ asked Rho-mu 31.
‘I think they’re just surprised you made one at all,’ put in Dalia, looking back into the compartment. ‘I don’t think they’re used to the Mechanicum trying to be funny.’
Rho-mu 31 nodded and said, ‘I may be Mechanicum, but I am still human.’
With that, the s
trange unease that had settled on them at the sight of the deserted townships was dispelled, and they began chatting as animatedly as when they had built the first version of the Akashic reader.
The excitement of the journey into the unknown was rekindled and as the mag-lev made its way uphill, Zouche extended a discreet dendrite and plugged into the compartment’s data port, projecting the view from the hull-mounted picter onto the glass of the window.
They eagerly watched the feed as Zouche panned the image around. They saw the desolate plains stretching away to the south and the black smudge on the horizon above the Magma City nearly two thousand kilometres away. At Caxton’s request, Zouche returned the view to front-on and the image shimmered as it displayed the silver mag-line carrying them up into the mountains.
Dalia let out a tiny gasp of fear as she saw the mag-line vanish into a gaping, steel-lined cavern mouth that pierced the flanks of the cliffs and led through the rock towards Mondus Gamma.
She took Caxton’s hand and gripped it tightly as the tunnel drew nearer, the yawning blackness of it suddenly terrifying.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t realise we’d need to go through the darkness,’ she said.
‘It’s just a tunnel,’ said Caxton. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
THE FORCES OF the Fabricator General came for Adept Zeth several hours before Dalia’s mag-lev approached the tunnel connecting the Tharsis uplands with the Syria Planum. A Mechanicum heavy flyer cruised in from the north-west and set down on the statue-lined Typhon Causeway before the Magma City, scorching a score of the marble worthies black with the heat of its enormous jets. The underside of the craft shone with golden light from the bubbling, steaming lava to either side of the wide causeway.
The ungainly aircraft was unarmed, but as it settled on its landing skids, a continuous loop of code streamed from its augmitters on a repeating cycle, demanding that Adept Koriel Zeth present herself by the order of the Fabricator General.