he said.
said Pavelka.
said Kotov.
Kotov sensed Pavelka’s guilty hesitation. Little could be hidden from one another in a mindspace communion.
said Pavelka,
said Pavelka.
said Pavelka, and Kotov’s link to the machine was abruptly severed, his mind whiplashing to the realm of external senses. His mechadendrites withdrew from the console as he stepped away, suddenly wary of what Pavelka intended and wishing he had exercised his right to see the root cause of her censure.
‘Everything all right, archmagos?’ asked Roboute Surcouf.
Kotov took a moment to realign himself and restore his communications to flesh-voice.
‘I am not sure,’ he said.
‘You said you could make this machine work,’ said Tanna.
‘There are locks on the rites of activation, Sergeant Tanna,’ said Kotov. ‘Secure beyond anything you can imagine. I cannot break them, but Magos Pavelka assures me she can.’
‘You cannot break them, but she can?’ said Tanna.
‘Ilanna has plenty of tricks up her sleeve,’ said Surcouf, and Kotov wondered if he knew what secrets Pavelka was keeping.
No sooner had Surcouf spoken than the control panel came to life with a sudden burst of blaring static and flickering illumination. Sparks erupted from the exload ports and a screeching wail of betrayed machine-spirits cut through the noosphere.
Kotov stumbled. A sharp spike of pain stabbed into the back of his skull. He sank to his knees, dizzy and disorientated by the sudden binaric assault.
Pavelka staggered from the console, her mechadendrites trailing crackling arcs of lightning. Surcouf ran to her as she collided with the railing.
But for his grip on Pavelka’s robes, she would have fallen.
Kotov blinked away the streams of corrupt binary cascading through his vision like digital tears. His entire body felt as though it had taken a jolt of aberrant current. He felt sick to the core with nausea.
‘What did you do?’ demanded Kotov. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, what did you do?’
‘What I had to,’ said Pavelka.
The taste of bile and a bitter electrical tang filled Kotov’s mouth. Backwashed floodstream. As close as an adept of the Mechanicus ever came to vomiting. He knew of only one thing that could cause such revulsion in blessed machines.
‘Scrapcode?’ hissed Kotov. ‘You stored scrapcode? No wonder you bear censure brands! Omnissiah save us from those who choose to dabble in the shadow artes! You are no better than Telok!’
‘It’s not scrapcode,’ insisted Pavelka, still leaning on Surcouf for support. ‘It’s a hexamathic disassembler language I designed to break the bond between a machine and its motive spirit.’
‘Why would you ever invent such a curse?’ demanded Kotov, spitting the word invent like an insult.
Pavelka ignored the question and said, ‘You wanted the locks disabled. Now they are. If you are so keen for us all to die here, then what does it matter how I did it?’
Kotov forced down his anger and the terrible ache at his temples as the machines below ignited with a boom of engaging gears and thunderous roars of motorised filters. High above, the enormous fan mechanisms began turning, drawing in vast breaths of the planet’s befouled atmosphere.
The upper reaches of the tower fogged as inhumanly vast engines buried beneath the tower began the arcane process of undoing the damage the planet-wide industry had wreaked.
‘The tower is activated,’ said Tanna. ‘Send the message.’
Kotov nodded, pushing his horror at what Pavelka had done to one side as he sent a repeating data-squirt of vox towards Tarkis Blaylock on the Speranza.
‘Archmagos,’ said Surcouf, looking over the edge of the gantry to the base of the assembler. ‘Whatever you’re doing, do it faster – we’re about to have company.’
It was actually working. The joint operation to clear a swathe of Exnihlio’s atmosphere was actually working. Blaylock sat on the Speranza’s command throne and drank in the data coming from the main entoptic display with a sense of pieces falling into place.
The luminescent curtain represented Kryptaestrex’s geoformers as twin smears of liquid light, their auspex returns blurred by the churning hell of transformative reactions surrounding them. In the eye of their alchymical storm was a cylinder of inert space, through which Azuramagelli’s linked chain of geostationary servitor drones threaded a needle-fine path.
They hadn’t penetrated deep enough to reach the surface yet, but the vox-system was lousy with ghost howls of distorted machine voices where before all it had screamed was static.
Galatea stalked the bridge on its misaligned legs, turning to look at him when it thought he wasn’t aware of its scrutiny. The machine-hybrid appeared to be surprised at his choice of location to implement the atmospheric breach, as though it knew something he did not. That alone gave Blaylock confidence that the Mars Volta’s planchette had steered him true.
Watching the play of data-light around the bridge, Blaylock was filled with a renewed sense of purpose. Never before had he felt so close to the Omnissiah, a presence clear in the miraculous web of causality that had brought him to this place.
The vast spirit of the Speranza’s machine heart was a constant pressure all around him. Intrusive, but not unpleasantly so. As though he were being observed by a being so massive that it existed beyond the limits of his perception, like a fragment of shale’s awareness of the mountain above it.
Had it been the Ark Mechanicus that steered him towards the solution he required? Blaylock didn’t know, but understood the profound theological implications that lay at the end of that proposition. Already he could see the outline of a monograph on the subject he might compose upon their return to Mars.
‘It seems your bickering subordinates may prove us wrong after all,’ said Galatea. ‘By our estimation, virtually clear space exists almost to the edge of the thermosphere.’
‘Indeed so,’ answered Blaylock. ‘I expect breach of the Kármán line imminently. Followed by attainment of the troposphere within ten to twelve hours.’
‘Pushing your geoformers closer to the planet will prove more difficult at that point. Lowering their altitude farther will put both vessels at great risk.’
‘It will,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘But that is a risk I am willing to take if it allows us to re-establish communications with our people on the surface.’
‘When your knowledge of events on the planet’s surface is so woefully incomplete, logic does not agree with you.’
Blaylock shook his head, tired of Galatea’s constant carping.
‘The more I listen to you, the more it seems that you actively seek to discourage communications with Archmagos Kotov. Why would that be?’
‘Discourage?’ said Galatea with a hissing chuckle. ‘Why should we wish that when our stated goal is the death of Archmagos Telok?’
‘That is a very good question,’ said Blaylock, rising from the command throne and standing before Galatea. His squat servitors emerged from behind the throne, realigning the gurgling pipes linked to his nutrient canister. ‘That is your stated aim, but whether or not it is your actual aim is something else entirely.’
‘You doubt our sincerity?’ growled Ga
latea, rising to its full, lopsided height to better display the hideously malformed nature of its construction. ‘Telok freed us from the shackles of the Manifold, but look at the body we are forced to inhabit! What benevolent creator inflicts such suffering on a living being?’
‘You are not a living being,’ said Blaylock, anger overcoming caution. ‘You are an abomination unto the Omnissiah.’
‘Our point exactly,’ said Galatea. ‘You see the full horror of our malformed body, and you understand why we wish him dead.’
‘How do Telok’s actions justify what you did to those who came to the Manifold station? What you did to Mistress Tychon?’
‘We did what we had to in order to survive, as would any sentient being,’ said Galatea. ‘Telok gave us purpose and promised freedom, yet he abandoned us to a life of solitary agony, trapped forever like an insect in a web.’
‘As I recall, you were more akin to the spider.’
Galatea shrugged its black-robed proxy body.
‘Without fresh minds to occupy our neuromatrix, our consciousness would have been extinguished long ago.’
‘You will forgive me if I do not see that as a bad thing.’
Galatea clattered over to where the main entoptic showed the distortion-wracked globe of Exnihlio, extending a robed arm towards the display. ‘Without our help, you would never have crossed the Halo Scar alive. Without us, we would not be on the cusp of achieving all we desire.’
Blaylock couldn’t decide whether Galatea’s ‘we’ included the Mechanicus or was simply its maddening insistence on referring to itself as a plurality.
‘Magos Blaylock!’ cried Kryptaestrex. The Master of Logistics turned his square frame from his station, every aspect of his noospheric aura alight with inloading data. ‘Contact! Contact!’
‘Atmospheric breach!’ added Azuramagelli.
‘Confirm: so soon?’ said Blaylock. ‘Current projections were a minimum of ten hours for tropospheric penetration.’
‘Confirmed, Magos Blaylock,’ said Kryptaestrex. ‘Atmospheric conditions seem to indicate the presence of a highly charged atmospheric processor on the planet’s surface.’
‘Almost directly beneath the geoformer vessels…’ said Azuramagelli, turning his latticework body to face Blaylock. Without facial features, it was left to the shimmering noospheric signifiers to convey his amazement. ‘How… how did you know…?’
Blaylock had not divulged to the bridge crew exactly how he had chosen this particular quadrant of the planet’s atmosphere. All he’d said was that the Omnissiah would surely guide their hand.
‘Yes, Tarkis,’ said Galatea, leaning down towards him with the dead silver eyes of its proxy body boring into him. ‘How did you know where to send the geoformers?’
Blaylock ignored the question, knowing on some unconscious level that to reveal his use of the Mars Volta to Galatea would be a mistake. The less the machine-hybrid knew of the secret workings of the Speranza the better.
Instead, he began issuing orders with all the curt efficiency for which he was known.
‘Cancel the automated vox-loop. If Archmagos Kotov is making contact with the Speranza, I want him to hear one of our voices,’ said Blaylock, moving from station to station and opening vox-links throughout the Speranza. ‘Magos Dahan? Your skitarii rapid responders?’
‘Are on immediate readiness alert,’ came the Secutor’s voice from the embarkation decks where he and his warriors were prepped and ready to fly. ‘Say the word and we are planetside.’
‘Prudence, Dahan,’ cautioned Blaylock. ‘Let us establish the situation before launching a full assault.’
Blaylock returned to the command throne and placed his metalled gauntlets upon its rests. Haptic connectors engaged and Blaylock’s servitors squealed as his data-burden spiked. He linked with the Speranza’s peripheral layers, feeling his presence expand within the noosphere as its vastness rose up around him.
Data-dense swathes of informational light rose from the silver deck plates like spectral veils and Blaylock parsed the most pertinent in seconds. His split consciousness divided between analysis of the rapidly stabilising column of static air linking the cold of space with the planet’s surface and the emissions rising from the planetary scale of its industry.
‘Archmagos Kotov,’ he began, but got no further before the vox erupted with a compressed data-blurt from Exnihlio. The grating sound blaring from the flanged mouths of the vox-grilles was just hashed static at first, too tightly packed to be understood.
Without giving any command, complex algorithms began unpacking the compressed signal and the noise instantly transformed into the voice of Archmagos Kotov.
‘–lock, this is Kotov. You are to immediately break orbit and make best speed for the Imperium. Repeat, break orbit and get as far away from Exnihlio as possible. Do not attempt to reach the surface, do not try to reach us. Go! Go now, for the sake of the Omnissiah, leave now and never come back!’
Blaylock listened to Kotov’s words with a growing sense of disbelief. The message was an exload of pre-recorded information. It had to be a mistake. A catastrophic disruption in the tight-beam transmission, perhaps? Despite the clear corridor linking them, residual pockets of localised distortion must be affecting the archmagos’s transmission.
Even as he formed the thought, he knew it to be delusional.
The signal was clean and uncorrupted, its every binaric particle stamped with Kotov’s noospheric signifiers, a more precise means of identification than even the most detailed genetic markers.
‘Blaylock?’ said Azuramagelli, similarly confused. ‘What does the archmagos mean?’
‘It’s a mistake,’ snapped Kryptaestrex, rounding on Azuramagelli. ‘Your damned servitor-relays have fouled the signal somehow. It’s the only explanation. It has to be, Tarkis.’
‘I do not know,’ replied Blaylock. ‘I–’
The vox crackled as the pre-recorded exload ended and Kotov’s voice filled the bridge. This time the words were spoken aloud and were filled with terrible urgency.
‘Tarkis, if you can hear this, the cog is on the turn. Telok is not what I thought at all – he is a monster and the Breath of the Gods is an alien perversion of unthinkable horror. Telok seeks to tear down everything we hold dear. Mars, the Imperium, everything. Unless you act now he will take the Speranza back to Mars and–’
Kotov’s words were abruptly cut off.
Dead air hissed from the vox.
Blaylock sat in stunned silence, trying to process his tumbling thoughts into some kind of rational order. Taken at face value, it turned his every certainty into a hideous joke. Had they come all this way just to find that the glittering promise at the end was in fact a trap as nightmarish as that which Galatea had set at the Valette Manifold station?
He wanted to believe that this was a mistake, a cruel subterfuge, but the evidence against that was right there in Kotov’s words.
‘Archmagos?’ said Blaylock. ‘Archmagos Kotov? Respond. Archmagos, respond immediately. Archmagos? Azuramagelli, keep trying.’
The Master of Astrogation returned to his data hub and began a broad-sweep vox-hail of the surface.
‘Are we even sure that was the archmagos?’ asked Kryptaestrex, approaching the throne.
‘Yes,’ said Blaylock. ‘I am sure.’
‘How can you be certain?’ demanded Kryptaestrex.
‘Because the cog is on the turn,’ said Blaylock. ‘Just as there are innocuous verbal cues to indicate a statement is being made under duress, there are codes to indicate that what is being said should be absolutely taken at face value. Archmagos Kotov’s use of the phrase, “the cog is on the turn” is of the latter persuasion.’
‘So what do we do?’
Blaylock hesitated before replying.
‘We follow Archmagos Kotov’s last order,’ said Blaylock. ‘We break orbit and return to the Imperium as fast we can.’
Another voice crackled over the vox.
??
?I’m sorry, Tarkis, but I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,’ said Vettius Telok.
And a shrieking spear of binaric fire stabbed up through Blaylock’s entire body. His haptic implants burned white hot as their connection seared his flesh to the throne. The Fabricatus Locum’s back arched with convulsive agonies, golden sparks erupting from his every point of connection. Synaptic pathways saturated with external communication inloads of hostile binary.
Millions of random images poured through his mind, occluding his thought processes with their banality. Yet even within this, there was a pattern. Repeating over and over was the image of a giant feline creature. Orange and black, its fearful symmetry was burning bright in a forest lit by a leering moon.
The feeder pipes connected to his shoulder-mounted canister tore free and noxious chem-nutrients sprayed the bridge. Still seated on the Speranza’s command throne, smoke from burned electricals curling from his augments, Blaylock grindingly shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, his voice filled with distortion as he fought the millions of errors triggering within the microcode of his body. ‘This is a sovereign vessel of the Adeptus Mechanicus, under the command of Archmagos Lexell Kotov. You have no right to take it.’
Telok’s sigh was heard throughout the Speranza.
‘And I so hoped to do this without violence.’
‘What are they?’ said Surcouf.
Tanna leaned over the railing at the edge of the gantry, wondering the same thing. Their speed and the tapered, bladed cast of their skulls told him they were predator creatures. That was enough for now.
They sped up the curling ramp that spiralled the height of the tower, moving in bounding leaps like an Assault Marine on the hunt. Tanna saw the power in their limbs and knew that, but for the curve of the ramp, they would already be upon them.
‘Battle robots?’ he suggested.
‘Those are not robots,’ gasped Pavelka, making the Icon Mechanicus across her chest at the sight of the charging creatures. ‘They are something far worse.’