Gods of Mars

  The skitarii took up covering positions, implanted weaponry aimed unerringly at the door. Vitali saw a mix of solid shot cannons and rotor-carbines. Two up-armoured warriors with full-face helms each carried a thunder hammer and a conical breacher maul.

  The centre section of the door fell inwards, eaten away by the unnatural power of the crystalline weaponry. The rest of the door swiftly followed as its structural integrity collapsed. Vitali saw shapes moving through a haze of vaporised metal and raised the graviton pistol. The barrel shook as floodstream chemicals boiled around his system.

  Crystalline creatures pushed through the ruined door. The first through were cut down by a fusillade of gunfire, shattered into red-limned fragments. More pushed over the remains.

  Arcing beams of green light stabbed into Elektrus. Vitali knew he should be shooting, but the pistol in his hand felt like a piece of archeotech he had no idea how to activate. Volleys of suppressive fire punched into the flanks of the attackers, but they were heedless of their survival. A crystal spike wreathed in green flame pointed at him. Vitali knew he should move, but instead sought to identify what manner of energy empowered the weapon through its emitted wave-properties.

  Hands grabbed him, and Vitali was dragged behind the barricade, irked he had not yet completed his spectroscopic analysis.

  ‘What in Thor’s name are you doing?’ yelled Coyne, holding the shock-pistol at his shoulder. ‘Do you have a death wish?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Vitali, struck by the ridiculousness of the question and his equally stupid behaviour. Was fixating on inconsequential details normal in a gunfight? Did all soldiers feel like this under fire? Perhaps Dahan might know.

  Perhaps a study on the physio-psychological…

  Vitali fought to control his panic, knowing fear was pushing his mind into self-preserving analytical mechanisms.

  Coyne fired blind over the top of the barricade and Vitali followed his example. He shot the graviton pistol without aiming, trusting the weapon’s war-spirit to find a target. Something shattered explosively.

  Hawke was laughing as he fired controlled bursts of las-fire into the enemy. He shot with the ingrained efficiency of a Guardsman. Vitali thought he was weeping, shouting something about the Emperor hating him. It made no sense, but what in war ever really made sense?

  The graviton pistol vibrated in his palm, indicating its willingness to fire again. Vitali knew he should rise and shoot, but the idea of putting himself in harm’s way kept his body rigid. An engine behind him detonated as a pair of green bolts exploded inside its mechanisms.

  Vitali winced as he heard the machine-spirit die.

  A skitarii fighter crashed to the ground beside him. The entirety of the warrior’s left side had been vaporised by the alien weaponry, his half-skull a blackened bowl of brain matter and cybernetic implants.

  Vitali looked away in horror. Coyne cried out as he took a hit, dropping behind the barricade and clutching his arm. His forearm was a blackened stump. Coyne’s eyes were saucers, wide with shock.

  ‘Every time,’ he said. ‘Every damn time…’

  More gunfire blazed. More explosions.

  Vitali pushed himself to his knees and leaned out to shoot the graviton pistol again. He saw the enormous ogre-creature with the crackling energy nexus in its chest. White-green light filled its body, like an illuminated diagram of a nervous system.

  Vitali pressed the firing stud and the crystalline monster was instantly crushed to the deck. Its body exploded into shards, like an invisible Imperator Titan had just stepped on it.

  The skitarii breachers charged into the enemy. Vitali saw one warrior drive his vast drill into the stomach of a crystalline beast with a horned skull. It came apart in a tornado of razor fragments, and Vitali thought he heard a million screams ripped from its body as it died. The thunder hammer warrior swung and obliterated three more, their forms coming apart in percussive detonations of glass and crystal. Two more died in as many swings. A spinning fragment nicked Vitali’s cheek and he flinched at the sudden pain.

  The breacher skitarii died as a collimated burst of fire cut him in two at the waist with the precision of a las-scalpel. He screamed as he fell, but kept fighting even as his viscera uncoiled onto the deck. His fellow close-combat warrior died seconds later as three creatures with extruded blade arms surrounded him and hacked him apart with pitiless blows that seemed altogether too cruel to be entirely mechanical.

  Vitali aimed the graviton pistol at the warrior’s killers. He pressed the firing stud, but the weapon buzzed angrily, its spirit not yet empowered enough to fire again. Vitali stared into the enemy monsters, a mass of killers wrought from the bones of ancient science by a madman.

  Hawke was on his haunches, sifting through the dead skitarii’s pack. Vitali hoped he was looking for a fresh powercell, though his search had all the hallmarks of a looting. Coyne had all but passed out, hyperventilating as he stared at the ruin of his arm.

  The skitarii weren’t shooting. Why weren’t they shooting?

  Because they’re dead. Everyone’s dead.

  I’ll be dead soon.

  The crystalline creatures aimed their weapon arms towards the rear of the temple. Where Abrehem Locke still sat upon the Throne Mechanicus. Vitali remembered what he’d said earlier, that Galatea would want to capture Abrehem alive.

  How wrong he had been. They had come here to kill him.

  Wait. Galatea? These were Telok’s warrior creatures…

  The expected volley of killing fire never came.

  A howling roar of unending rage echoed from the walls.

  Vitali heard pounding iron footfalls. Animalistic bellows. Whipping cracks of energy-sheathed steel. Glass exploded as something impossibly swift hurled itself into the midst of the crystal beasts.

  It was too fast to follow, even for Vitali’s enhanced optics. All he could form were fleeting impressions. Rage distilled, fury personified. It killed without mercy.

  Shrieking electro-flails cut glass bodies apart like a maddened surgeon. ’Slaught-boosted musculature tore the forge’s attackers into disembodied shards of inert crystal. An iron-sheathed skull battered ones of glass to powder. It roared as it killed, a bestial thing of hate and unquenchable bloodlust.

  Vitali watched the crystalline creatures destroyed in seconds, shattered to fragmented ruin by an engine of slaughter wrought in human form.

  And then it came for him.

  Vitali had never seen arco-flagellants in combat, only at rest.

  He never wished to see one again.

  Its identity blazed in the hostile binary scrolling over its blood-red optics.

  Rasselas X-42.

  The arco-flagellant halted millimetres from Vitali. Its lips drew back to reveal sharpened iron teeth, its claws poised to strike. He felt the heat of its killing power, an urge to murder that went deeper than any implanted Mechanicus battle-doctrinas.

  This thing wanted to kill him.

  And, for a heartbeat, Vitali thought it just might.

  Then, deciding he was no threat, it pushed past him, taking up position before Abrehem Locke like an Assassinorum life-ward.

  Vitali fought the urge to flee as he saw a bulky shadow silhouetted in the firelight from beyond the ruin of the door.

  Tall and encased in heavy plates of hissing pneumatic armour, Totha Mu-32’s chromium mantle billowed in rogue thermals. He rammed a bladed stave on the ground as though reclaiming this forge for the Mechanicus. Beside him was a figure in a cream robe with a mono-tasked augmetic arm and a dented iron skull-plate.

  Noospheric ident-tags named him Ismael de Roeven.

  The One who Returned.

  A hundred chainveiled warriors in the livery of Mechanicus Protectors stood behind Ismael and Totha Mu-32, bulked with combat augmetics and bearing an array of absurdly lethal weaponry.

  ‘We come to protect the Machine-touched,’ said Ismael, with black tears streaming down his cheeks.

  ‘With any and
all means at our disposal,’ finished Totha Mu-32, with a distasteful glance at Rasselas X-42.

  ‘I think you might be too late,’ said Chiron Manubia.

  Vitali didn’t know what she meant.

  Until he looked where she looked.

  And saw the blood pooled around the Throne Mechanicus.

  Rising from the black depths of Exnihlio, the first thing to strike Roboute was the sheer intensity of the blue sky. The last time he’d seen a sky so pure had been on Iax, when he’d taken Katen on a system-run out to First Landing for their first anniversary. He’d never expected to see anything like it again, but Exnihlio’s cloudless skies were the blue of remembered youth, going on forever like the clearest ocean.

  Gone were the strato-storms and the lightning clawing from the horizon. All trace of atmospheric violation was utterly absent.

  He was also pleased to see that Kotov’s understanding of Exnihlio’s deep infrastructure had been correct. All around them, elevated linear induction rails arced like slender flying buttresses, threading steel canyons from a series of shuttered conveyance hangars.

  A host of silver, bullet-nosed trains sat idle on humming rails, surrounded by motionless servitors with slack features and eyes devoid of purpose. Bereft of commands, they shuffled between work stations, waiting for tasks that would never come.

  Roboute walked into the light, cupping his hands over his eyes and smiling to see open skies once more. An invisible weight lifted from his shoulders at the sight of such brilliant blue.

  ‘What happened here?’ said Tanna, removing his helmet and taking a breath of uncorrupted air. ‘Where are the storms?’

  ‘Ultra-rapid terraforming,’ said Pavelka, hunched and exhausted with the climb from the depths. ‘Every universal assembler within hundreds of kilometres has been activated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Telok’s endgame,’ said Kotov, pointing to a gap between the rhomboidal towers of a bifurcating induction rail. ‘They are coming online for the same reason we activated one, to get something up to the Speranza.’

  Roboute followed the archmagos’s mechadendrite and felt a cyst of nausea form in his gut as he saw the sick, shimmering radiance haloing the towers.

  ‘No…’ he said, hints of the spinning mesh of silver leaves and impossible angles making his eyes water. Was it just his imagination or was the Breath of the Gods bigger than before? Was it even possible to know its size with any certainty?

  One by one, eldar, mortal, Mechanicus and post-human, they came to marvel at the ascent of Telok’s diabolical machine. No matter their birth origin, every soul was ensnared by its unnatural light and its physics of violation.

  ‘An abominable birth,’ said Bielanna. ‘The Yngir’s engine tears free from its sepulchral womb.’

  The farseer’s eyes shone with a fierce light, and the burden of age Roboute had seen upon her was undone. The black lines beneath her porcelain skin were now veins of gold in the palest marble. Every one of the eldar seemed invigorated by the light coming from the Breath of the Gods. A salutary reminder that their senses were not cut from the same cloth as humanity’s.

  ‘All times become one,’ she said. ‘Even as the threads of the past and present are cut, new threads are drawn from the future into the engine’s gyre.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Roboute.

  ‘New life spreads its light to those around it,’ said Bielanna, tears springing from her eyes. ‘It means I am being renewed. It means that those I thought lost forever might yet be given a chance of life.’

  The train was a wide-bodied cargo transporter. It sped at incredible velocity through the forge world’s towering spires in near silence on linear induction rails. It passed through the interiors of numerous forge-complexes, and within each, the signs of this world’s imminent abandonment were clear. With the Breath of the Gods rising to the Speranza, Telok had no more need of Exnihlio.

  Within each forge, the previously industrious servitors stood immobile. Without their attentions the engines which they had tended were now thundering towards destruction.

  Exnihlio’s machines were dying. Monolithic data-stacks melted down without the proper rites of placation. Generators belched fire and lightning as volatile cores spun up to critical levels.

  Kotov attempted to plot a route from the driver’s compartment as Pavelka sought access to the systems controlling the switching gear for the rails.

  All to bring them to where the Breath of the Gods was ascending.

  Where it was, Telok would be.

  And killing Telok was all Tanna had left.

  He knelt on the grilled floor of the train’s second compartment, his sword held point down before him. Its quillons framed his eyes, and Tanna stared at the spread wings of the golden eagle forming the hilt, admiring the fine workmanship of the artificers.

  A chainsword was not an elegant weapon. No swordsman of note would ever wield one and no epic duels had been fought with such a weapon. It was a butcher’s blade, a tool wrought to kill as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And yet this blade had been given a finish the equal of Varda’s Black Sword. The spirit within was as keen-edged as its teeth had once been.

  Tanna stood and lifted the weapon, turning it over in his hands. He tested the heft and weight, flexing his fingers on the handle.

  ‘Does it feel any different?’ asked Varda.

  ‘A few grams lighter where teeth have come loose, but otherwise unchanged,’ said Tanna.

  ‘Mine too,’ agreed Varda, cutting the air with the midnight edge of the Black Sword and sighting down the length of its blade. ‘Do you think Adept Pavelka did anything at all?’

  ‘I can only hope so,’ said Tanna. ‘Whatever techno-sorcery she has worked on my blade has not altered it in a way I can detect.’

  Varda lowered his blade and lifted Tanna’s fettered sword arm. The links were buckled after the fight against the Tindalosi.

  ‘Your chain,’ said Varda. ‘The binding is all but gone.’

  ‘You worried I’ll drop my sword?’

  ‘No, never that,’ said Varda.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Would that we had the time, brother, I would have been honoured to forge your chain anew as you forged mine.’

  Tanna nodded in understanding and took Varda’s hand in his, accepting the brotherhood his Emperor’s Champion offered. The rest of the Black Templars gathered around him, their weapons drawn, their faces sombre.

  They could all feel it too.

  The end of their crusade was upon them.

  No sooner had Tanna formed the thought than the train roof buckled with multiple powerful impacts. Thunderous booms of iron on steel. Claws like swords punched through the metal and the contoured roof of the train peeled back. Turbulent air rammed inside. Windows blew out and high-tension cables whipped through the compartment as the train’s fuselage crumpled.

  Tanna dived to the side as something vast and silver dropped into the train. A hulking body alive with emerald wychfire. Eyes a mass of dead static and hunger.

  Ebon-black claws unsheathed.

  ‘Tindalosi!’ he shouted.

  Hawkins had fought over Magos Dahan’s training deck more times than he cared to remember. But no simulation, however sophisticated, could ever accurately replicate the truth of war. Even the lethal subterranean kill maze of Kasr Creta, populated by mutant warp-lunatics with hook-bladed knives and ripper-guns, had an air of unreality to it.

  But this?

  This was real.

  The corpses, the smoking craters and the yelling all testified to the reality of this fight. Neon streams of las and alien fire filled the Imperial city currently occupying the deck, a choked mass of plascrete and steel that stank of hot iron and oil. Roving packs of skitarii and weaponised servitors duelled with the enemy forcing a path across the open space at the heart of the deck.

  Hundreds of vacant-eyed servitors milled in a wide plaza with a tall statue of a winged Space Marine at its
centre. They reminded Hawkins of gawping civilians who didn’t have the good sense to run like hell when the shooting started. The thousands of crystalith warrior-constructs were ignoring them, but plenty had already been mown down in the blistering crossfire.

  Hawkins and his command platoon sheltered in a modular structure of cavernous proportions towards the starboard edge of the deck. Shot-blasted rebars and chunks of polycarbon rubble surrounded them. Crouched at the edge of the rubble to get a clear line of sight over the battlefield, Hawkins issued orders to other Cadian units in the training deck, shouting into the vox-horn to be heard over the cacophony of gunfire. Behind him, Rae and five Guardsmen fired through hastily punched loopholes. Others reloaded or prepared demo-charges.

  Green fire threw jagged, leaping shadows.

  Explosions blew prefabbed buildings apart. Burning bodies tumbled from their gutted ruins. Most were steel-jacketed skitarii, but some were Cadians. Guardsmen wearing the scarlet campaign badges of Creed company leapt from the burning building.

  They ran to take cover in the shadow of a grand, cathedral-like edifice that dominated one end of the plaza. Coordinated fire from its numerous defensive ramparts and armoured pillboxes expertly covered their displacement.

  Lieutenant Gerund’s Hotshot company fought from an emplaced position jutting from the corner of a structure that looked like an Adeptus Arbites Hall of Justice. Hawkins had split Valdor company into marauding combat teams and spread them through the tumbledown ruins to savage the enemy with enfilading missiles.

  Hawkins ducked back as an emerald explosion threw up chunks of rock and mesh decking. He scanned the battlefield for anything he’d missed, any opportunity to exploit enemy mistakes. He saw nothing, but aspects of the city’s layout seemed damnably familiar. Something at the back of his mind told him he’d seen this place before, but where?

  Had Dahan put them through this setup? He didn’t think so.

  ‘Why did you bother with the statue?’ he wondered, then grinned as it suddenly hit him why he recognised this battlefield.

  ‘You clever metal bastard,’ he said.