‘Everyone on board!’ he yelled. ‘That tower’s not going to activate itself!’
Blaylock’s quarters aboard the Speranza were virtually identical to those at the heart of his forge in the Cebrenia Quadrangle. As a rule, he disliked change for change’s sake, and found those adepts who claimed that such things fostered creativity to be tiresome in the extreme.
He had no need to sleep; augmentations within his cranial cavity simulated the experience with no need of a bed, and the chemicals dispensed from his spinal cylinder provided nutrients and hormones far superior to those produced naturally.
Thus his private quarters were more of a workshop than a place to rest and recuperate. With his hunched servitors dormant behind him, Blaylock sat on a reinforced stool at his workbench, bent over a hardwood square of wood that could have come straight from the communion chamber of an astropath.
It measured precisely forty-five centimetres square, and its lacquered sheen was a rich red to match the sands of Mars. Harvested from the gene sample of an extinct Calibanite tree known as a Northwild, its grain and workability were analogous to the equally extinct mahogany of Old Earth. Its surface colour had deepened evenly in the centuries since Magos Alhazen had presented it to him upon his ascension to the Cult Mechanicus. Like Blaylock, it had matured with a precision that was to be admired in something fashioned from the unpredictability of organic matter.
Embossed gold lettering ran around its edges, a mixture of quantum rune combinations, binaric shorthand and the divine ordinals of the Machine-God’s aspects. Looping curves and ellipses, like patterns inscribed by a rotating orrery, were etched into its surface, and it was across these lines that Blaylock moved a planchette of wood cut from the same tree.
Alhazen had called it a Mars Volta, a conduit to the Omnissiah once favoured by the Zethist cults, but Blaylock had never used it until now. He wasn’t sure what had driven him to seek it out, but pondering the conundrum of establishing vox with the surface, the image of it stowed in his quarters had come to him unbidden.
Such objects had fallen out of favour in the Mechanicus over the centuries. Most were held only as curios by the more superstitious priests of Mars, but if there was even the remotest chance it could help him in this hour of need, then Blaylock was prepared to explore any option, no matter how illogical it might seem.
Kryptaestrex’s geoformer vessels were mere hours from launching, laden with alchymical saturators and a host of Azuramagelli’s astrogation servitor probes filling their cavernous holds. Neither adept’s idea on its own would likely breach the distortion in Exnihlio’s atmosphere, but together they might offer a fleeting window to the surface.
But even two geoformer vessels could only run their processors over a limited area of atmosphere, perhaps a sixteenth of the planetary volume. Not enough to be sure that anyone on the surface could receive or transmit a signal. Whichever portion of the planetary atmosphere was cleared would need to be more or less right over Archmagos Kotov for it to be any use.
Azuramagelli had the bridge, sending a constant stream of vox-hails to the surface, while Kryptaestrex oversaw the deployment of his vastly complex geoformer vessels. Such ships were ungainly constructions, designed to sit in low orbit or within a hostile planetary biosphere. What they were not designed for was establishing geostationary orbit in chaotic electromagnetic storms on the edge of the mesosphere.
Blaylock had studied every orbital scan of Exnihlio a thousand times in picoscopic detail, searching for clues as to where best to despatch the geoformers. Every analytical tool at his disposal had yielded nothing; no region where the distortion was thinner or any hint that a location of particular significance lay below.
And so it came to this. He placed his metallic fingers placed lightly on the wooden planchette atop the Mars Volta. He had no idea how to begin, and settled for one of the first, most basic prayers to the Machine-God.
‘With learning I cleanse my flesh of ignorance.
‘With knowledge I grow in power.
‘With technology I revere the God of all Machines.
‘With its power I praise the glory of Mars.
‘All hail the Omnissiah, who guides us to learning.’
It had been centuries since Blaylock had said these words. The incantation was taught to novices with barely an augmentation to their name and its reassuring simplicity pleased him.
And then the planchette moved.
Blaylock’s surprise was total. He hadn’t truly expected anything to come of consulting the Mars Volta. Blaylock discounted ideomotor responses, his artificial nervous system was immune to such things, but he could detect no conscious direction to the motion of his arms.
The planchette moved from one number group to another as it slid effortlessly across the board. Blaylock watched it with a growing sense of the divine moving within him, a holy purpose that had long been absent from his life.
His servitor dwarfs jerked as his floodstream surged with excitement. They jabbered meaningless glossolalia as the power flowing through him passed to their mono-directed brains.
Blaylock’s arms were no longer his own, but extensions of the Machine-God, a way for it to pass its wisdom from the infinity point to the mortal realms. The numbers kept coming until at last the planchette halted in the middle of the board.
Blaylock lifted his trembling hands from the wooden pointer.
The numbers were etched in his mind, precise and unambiguous.
Blaylock engaged the embedded holo-slate on his workbench and fed in the planetary scans of Exnihlio, followed by the number strings he had just learned.
And a segment of the planet’s orbital volume illuminated.
As modes of transport went, the ore-hauler wasn’t the worst in which Roboute had travelled. That honour belonged to a medicae Chimera with a misaligned track unit and an air-filter a careless enginseer had inadvertently attached to the bio-waste sump.
But it was a close second.
Pavelka sat at the controls, with Archmagos Kotov plugged in next to her. Both had extended mechadendrites into the wall of the cab behind them and were using the ore-hauler’s simple logic-engine as a proxy to carefully explore the local noospheric network.
The Cadians and Black Templars rode in the empty materials hopper behind them, holding on to whatever they could to keep from being shaken apart by the ore-hauler’s juddering movements. Ariganna Icefang had point-blank refused to allow her warriors to be carried in the back of the ore-hauler like livestock.
‘We are fleeter on foot,’ said Bielanna when the eldar’s refusal almost sparked an outbreak of violence. ‘We will keep pace with you, Archmagos Kotov. Have no fear of that.’
Roboute sat next to Pavelka and Kotov, staring through the armourglass canopy at the incredible vistas beyond. Every now and then he would take out his astrogation compass, each time finding the needle pointed towards the universal assembler.
‘You’d trust that thing over my route?’ said Pavelka.
‘Never hurts to have a second opinion,’ replied Roboute, tapping the glass of the compass. ‘Besides, it’s agreeing with you.’
Their route wound its way between a labyrinth of forge-temples and generatoria, and now led them through a vast forest of soaring electrical pylons. Latticework towers of gleaming steel, each was like the framework of a stalagmite not yet clothed in rock. Sparking cables traced graceful parabolas high above them and intersected in Gordian knots, junction boxes and transformer hubs. Sputtering power still coursed along them, dripping like rivulets of molten metal. Roboute didn’t doubt that if the ore-hauler even brushed against one, everyone aboard would be killed instantly.
Static crackled from every metal surface in the cab, so Roboute kept his hands placed firmly on his lap while the ore-hauler traversed this glittering forest of steelwork towers.
Ahead, the universal assembler tower loomed over everything. Closer now, Roboute could truly appreciate the enormous scale of the device. Set against such
vast structures, it wasn’t easy to accurately gauge its height, but Roboute estimated it towered well over three kilometres. The ore-hauler was eating up the distance, and Pavelka confidently predicted that, barring unforeseen incidents, they should arrive at its base in twenty-one minutes.
‘I truly believed the Omnissiah had brought me here,’ said Kotov, staring up at the universal assembler. ‘Every aspect of the quest was a blessed sign, confirmation I was doing the right thing. How could I have known what it would lead us to? Surely I cannot be blamed for Telok’s insanity?’
‘You interpreted the signs the way you wanted to,’ said Pavelka with a rueful shake of her head. ‘An archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus undone by confirmation bias. It would almost be amusing if not for the terrible threat you have unleashed.’
‘The signs did lead here,’ answered Kotov. ‘We found Telok. If it wasn’t me, someone would have found their way here eventually.’
‘Then I’m sure the Imperium will forgive you in a few thousand years,’ said Pavelka bitterly. ‘Assuming Telok hasn’t remade it in his own image by then.’
To Roboute’s surprise, Kotov didn’t rise to Pavelka’s barb.
Instead, he nodded reflectively and said, ‘Did you know that Telok was a hero of mine for many years? His early work was quite brilliant – visionary even. Until his obsession with the Breath of the Gods took over his researches, he was a pioneer within the Mechanicus. Some believed he might one day be Fabricator General.’
‘If we don’t stop him he might yet,’ said Roboute. ‘And you know they say you should never meet your heroes. They’ll never match the image you’ve built up for them.’
‘That sounds like personal experience talking, Master Surcouf.’
‘It is,’ said Roboute. ‘I was on Damnos and met someone I’d idolised for years. It didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped.’
Pavelka and Kotov fell silent. Both had clearly heard of the terrible wars fought across that blighted world.
‘Were you part of the campaign that saw it reclaimed for the Imperium by the Ultramarines?’ said Kotov.
‘No, I was there when it first fell,’ said Roboute. ‘Back then I was a junior Naval officer, part of the flotilla that made dozens of mercy runs down to Kellenport. The planet was lost by the time we arrived, and tens of thousands of people needed to be evacuated from the surface.’
Roboute paused, seeing an echo of the unnatural skies over the space port in Exnihlio’s. With half-closed eyes, he could still picture the furious battles raging at Kellenport’s many gates; the thousands of silver-skinned alien horrors and the tiny bands of determined heroes in cobalt-blue armour.
‘To honour our part in the evacuation, the pilots of the drop-ships who flew the mercy runs were granted an audience with the leader of the Ultramarines force, a warrior named Cato Sicarius. I knew of him, of course. Who in Ultramar didn’t? I knew every battle he’d fought, every victory he’d won and had studied every tactica he’d ever written. I couldn’t wait to meet him.’
‘Was he not everything you’d hoped?’
‘Damnos was lost from the start,’ sighed Roboute. ‘No force in the Imperium could have won that first war. We saved over thirty thousand people from certain death, which was a victory in itself, but Sicarius didn’t see it that way.’
‘How did he see it?’
‘That he’d lost. That he’d been beaten,’ said Roboute. ‘Not the Ultramarines. Him personally. He had no interest in meeting us, but someone higher up than him must have insisted on it. Months after we left Damnos, a helot escorted us to one of the fighting decks where Sicarius was busy demolishing combat servitors by the dozen. He thanked us for our efforts through gritted teeth, and looked at us like we’d betrayed him by taking part in the evacuation rather than fighting.’
‘Perhaps you should have told me that story before we set out?’
‘Perhaps I should have,’ agreed Roboute. ‘Would it have made a difference?’
‘Probably not,’ admitted Kotov. ‘I am not a man given to changing his mind.’
‘Archmagos, we’re going to stop him,’ said Roboute. ‘Telok, we’re going to stop him.’
Kotov’s face crumpled and he shook his head. ‘I admire your optimism, Master Surcouf. No doubt a product of your Ultramarian upbringing, and evidence for nurture over nature. But you heard Telok. How can we hope to hide on a world of his making? No, I estimate we will all be dead within six hours at the most.’
‘Not if we keep moving,’ said Roboute. ‘We’ll get that assembler tower operational. Then we can get help from the Speranza.’
‘Help from the Speranza?’
‘If we can clear the atmosphere enough for vox, we can clear it enough to allow reinforcements to get to us. Trust me, after flying through Kellenport’s atmosphere, getting down here should be easy for a half-decent pilot. All we have to do is stay alive.’
Kotov looked strangely at him, a look of genuine puzzlement.
‘Reinforcements? No, that’s not what’s going to happen at all.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Master Surcouf, if we can make contact with Magos Blaylock, the first order I will give him is to get the Speranza as far away from this planet as he possibly can.’
The cartographae dome had always been a place of sanctuary for Vitali Tychon, somewhere the universe made sense. The movements of galaxies, stars and planets were a carefully orchestrated ballet, where it was easy to be fooled into seeing the hand of a creator rather than the beauty of fundamental universal laws.
He and Linya had known years of familial contemplation in places like this. From the gravitational wave observatories high on Olympus Mons to the Quatrian Galleries, they had stared deep into the farthest reaches of the universe in search of the unexplained.
Explorators of the mind, Linya had been fond of saying as she gently steered conversations away from his suggestions that she take a cartographae position on a Mechanicus vessel. Not that he wanted her to leave, but neither did he wish to deny her the chance to travel to the wonders they saw.
Without entoptic representations of the stellar environs, the hemispherical vault of the dome was an austere place, its polished slopes of cold metal bare and echoing. The acid-etched floor was cut steel, a cog of course, and Vitali found himself pacing like a condemned man.
Vitali had thought himself above petty notions of vengeance, but his actions on the Speranza’s bridge had shown him just how prey he was to first tier thinking. Adara Siavash had paid for that lapse with his life. Galatea had killed the boy, but that didn’t stop the guilt from weighing heavily on Vitali.
What chance had he to avenge Linya when whatever remained of her essence was held hostage and threatened with extinction? What kind of father allowed his daughter’s killer to live while he still breathed?
Vitali had believed his body to be incapable of manifesting grief in any physical way, but oh, how he had been proved wrong. Each time a particularly vivid recall of Linya surfaced, bilious eructations in his floodstream sent painful currents through his limbs and tore raw, animal cries of loss from his augmitters.
‘Part of me wishes I could feel nothing,’ he said to the empty dome. ‘To be so remote from my humanity that your loss would mean nothing. And then I remember you… and I wish I could be an ordinary man so I could grieve as a father should…’
Conceived as nothing more than a genetically identical replacement, an assistant at best, a billions to one mutation had transformed a cell culture of his DNA into a truly singular individual. Combining the best of Vitali and her own uniqueness, Linya had confounded his every expectation by exceeding him in every way.
He had long since surrendered his birth-eyes, but in the fractional blackness of each ocular cycle, he saw Linya.
…as a still-wet babe, freshly removed from the nutrient tank.
…a precocious child correcting the tutors in Scholam Excelsus.
…being inducted into the Cult
Mechanicus on the slopes of the Tharsis Montes.
But most of all Vitali remembered her as Little Linya, his beloved daughter.
Beautiful and brilliant, she resisted every outward pressure to conform to the prototypical behavioural models of the Mechanicus. She trod her own path and forged her own destiny. Linya was going to shake the adepts of Mars to their foundations.
Galatea’s murderous surgery ended any possibility of that.
The machine-hybrid had destroyed something beautiful, and for what? Its own amusement? To cause Vitali pain? Perhaps both. He doubted it needed her brain tissue for any truly lofty purpose.
‘You claimed to have crossed the Halo Scar with us to kill Telok!’ cried Vitali into the dome. ‘So what need did you have for my Linya!’
His cry bounced from the cold walls of the dome, ringing back and forth in accusing echoes. Vitali sank to the acid-etched skull and buried his head in his hands. He wanted to cry, to have some biological outlet for his grief, some way to empty himself of the things he was feeling.
He didn’t see the light at first.
Only when the trickle of data-light triggered his passive inload receptors did Vitali look up in puzzlement. He glanced over his shoulder, seeing the control lectern dark and cold. Its spirit was dormant.
Then why was there a shimmering veil of light hovering in the centre of the dome? Vitali picked himself up and let the data inherent in the light wash through him. His floodstream pulsed with a beat of nervous excitement as he recognised the system being displayed.
Quatria.
Faint, barely visible.
Vitali took hesitant steps towards the light, fearful and hopeful of what this vision of his beloved Quatria might represent. Hexamathic calculus streamed around the orrery of light, complex equations that strained the limits of his understanding. He understood the principles of this arcane geometric binary, and was equipped with the necessary conversion implants to process it, but had always left such communication to…
‘Linya…?’ he said, the Mechanicus part of his mind berating him for even voicing the thought.