He passed Kotov, who had his gold-chased pistol gripped tightly in one swaying mechadendrite. The two skitarii flanked the archmagos, ready to give their lives in service to the Mechanicus. Kotov gave Tanna a look that might have been apologetic, but probably wasn’t.
‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Kotov with a grim nod of acknowledgement towards the enemy ranks. Diamond-sharp blades of glass shone under the clear blue of the sky. ‘Any grand plans or stratagems? Any words of wisdom from Rogal Dorn or Sigismund to see us victorious?’
‘No pity, no remorse, no fear,’ said Tanna, holding out his combat blade to Magos Pavelka. ‘The techno-sorcery you worked on our weapons, will it work on these crystaliths?’
Pavelka lifted her hooded head, and Tanna hid his revulsion at the sunken scorch marks around her dead optics.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘If you drive your blade deep enough.’
‘Be assured of that,’ promised Tanna.
The veterans of the war on Khai-Zhan spoke of Vogen in hushed tones, and those same soldiers traded knowing looks when talk inevitably turned to the Palace of Peace. The tales of heroism surrounding the battles fought there were already legendary.
‘I remember every soldier of Cadia wished he could have been there,’ said Rae, firing his rifle empty in six controlled bursts of semi-auto. This was the sergeant’s fourth rifle, the burned-out frames of his previous three abandoned along the fluidly shifting battle line.
‘Funny thing,’ said Hawkins, ducking back as a series of green bolts slammed into the wall above him. ‘Always easier to wish you were there after the fighting’s done. Not so much fun being there when the las is coming like rain off the Valkyrie Peninsulas.’
‘Aye, there’s truth in that, sir,’ agreed Rae.
Rock dust and infill fell, reminding Hawkins that this wasn’t Vogen and the structure behind him wasn’t the impregnable fortress of the Palace of Peace. To either side of him, hundreds of Cadians in hastily prepared positions fought to keep the enemy from crossing Angel Square. Hawkins had his soldiers deployed as Colonel Hastur had during the Final Ten Days, when a combined host of Iron Warriors and the Brothers of the Sickle mounted their fifth assault.
Hastur’s infantry platoons had been more than a match for the traitorous slave soldiers, but it had taken heavy armour to blunt the Iron Warriors’ assault. Heavy armour Hawkins didn’t have.
Rae tossed aside his lasrifle, its barrel heat-fused and useless. He tore a frag from his webbing and hurled it towards the statue of Sanguinius at the centre of the square.
‘Fire in the hole!’
A knot of four crystal creatures fell to shattered ruin as the grenade exploded.
‘And forgive me, Lord of the Angels,’ added Rae as the force of the blast ripped one of the statue’s wings loose.
‘Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, right?’ said Hawkins.
‘Depends on who you’re asking,’ said Rae, hunting for a fresh rifle among the fallen.
‘Rae!’ shouted Hawkins, throwing over his own rifle.
‘Much appreciated, sir,’ said Rae, catching the weapon and resuming firing without missing a beat.
‘What you seeing, sergeant?’
‘We’re getting hit hard on the right, sir,’ answered Rae. ‘I reckon there’s a big push coming there. Some clever bugger in the enemy knows we don’t have armour there to enfilade.’
Percussive blasts rocked the training deck as the recreation of the Vogen Law Courts finally collapsed. Even over the crash of falling masonry and flames, Hawkins heard the screams.
‘Hellfire,’ swore Hawkins. ‘Hotshot company were in there.’
‘Heavy weapons?’
‘Heavy weapons,’ agreed Hawkins, thinking back to the Last Ten Days. The Law Courts had offered a perfect vantage point for Hastur’s support platoons to rain plunging fire onto the thinner topside armour of the Iron Warriors Land Raiders. In the final stages of the battle, it had come down to arming mortar shells by hand and soldiers dropping from the fire-blackened windows with demo-charges clutched to their chests.
The original building had been blast-hardened to withstand repeated artillery barrages, but this structure hadn’t been nearly as tough. Without those weapons, the right flank was completely open. Bulky shapes of jagged-edged glass were already lumbering from the ruins. Powerfully built monsters the size of a Sentinel.
‘Westin!’ he shouted, ‘Westin, where are you?’
The vox-man scrambled over pitted sheets of flakboard and ruptured kinetic ablatives. Westin had tried to keep up with Hawkins, but better vox-men than he had been left wallowing in the captain’s wake. Westin’s camo-cape flapped in the anabatic thermals of high-energy las as he scooted into cover beside Hawkins.
He half turned, presenting the vox-caster’s workings.
Hawkins cranked the handle. No point in shouting at Jahn Callins. If the tanks weren’t here, there was a good reason for that. He had to get guns to bear on that flank. The vanguard of the enemy’s thrust emerged from the ruins, a towering brute with arms like kite-shields and a profusion of weapon spines running the length of its back. A hosing stream of heavy bolter fire ripped into it. The shells impacted on its wide arms without effect as three missiles slammed into it.
One arm blew off in a shower of razored shards and the beast collapsed, its weapons spines blazing harmlessly at the ceiling. Another two of the heavily armed creatures lumbered from the collapsed structure, flames reflecting from their multi-faceted limbs. More followed them, enough to overrun this flank for sure.
Hawkins shouted into the vox.
‘Creed! Two support teams to the right flank, sector tertius omega!’ he yelled. ‘Step quickly now.’
Creed’s answer was lost in a blaze of static and a roaring stream of fire that came from the newly arrived creatures. Hawkins flinched as the blast struck the Palace of Peace. A balcony of missile-armed Guardsmen came tumbling down fifty metres to Hawkins’s left.
Before he could detach soldiers from any other platoon, a flurry of streaking rockets arced up on an exacting parabola and slammed down in the ruins of the Law Courts. Violet-hued explosions threw deformed sheets of prefabricated steel and plascrete thirty metres into the air. Collimated bursts of turbolasers swept the ruins.
Hawkins hoped there weren’t any Cadians left alive in there.
‘By the Eye, would you look at that!’ shouted Rae as a host of lightly armoured tanks on articulated spider-limbs advanced down what had been known as Snipers’ Alley.
Of course, it had been the Lord Generals who’d called it that, because that was the only route they traversed. Any soldier who’d fought in Vogen knew that every street was a snipers’ alley.
Hawkins recognised the vehicles. Mechanicus scout tanks in the main, faster than most fighting vehicles, but nowhere near as heavily armoured or armed as Hawkins would have liked.
The Mechanicus designation for them was something meaninglessly binaric, but the Cadians had dubbed them Black Widows. Fast, agile and lethal to lightly armoured targets. Less useful against heavy armour, but better than nothing. Skitarii packs flanked the Widows, adding their own weight of fire to the counter-attack.
At the heart of the Mechanicus tanks was an open-topped Rhino with a thundering battery of quad-mounted heavy bolters on its glacis. Riding atop the Iron Fist like a god-king of some ancient host of warrior-priests was a multi-armed figure in gold, silver and brass. His lower arms were electrified scarifier tines and his upper limbs held a bladed halberd with a crackling energy pod at its base.
‘Emperor save me, if he isn’t a sight for sore eyes!’ said Rae.
Hawkins had to agree, Magos Dahan was indeed a welcome sight.
The skitarii chanted something as Dahan’s Widows fired again. It sounded like a name, but it wasn’t one Hawkins recognised.
‘Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo!’
At its every shout, Dahan held his halberd aloft.
Bellicose roars of binary brayed f
rom Dahan’s chest augmitters, a war cry that sent a shiver down even Hawkins’s spine. The quad bolters took down the two crystalline weapon beasts in precisely targeted bursts. Without them to punch through the Cadians, infantry power was stopping the rest of the advance.
For now.
As the skitarii pushed out to secure the edge of the ruined Law Courts, Dahan guided the Iron Fist towards the centre of the Cadian line. Mechanicus Protectors bearing shimmering energy shields and bladed staves ran alongside the modified vehicle.
‘Welcome to the Palace of Peace,’ said Hawkins as Dahan jumped down into the cover of the rubble-strewn berm of plascrete.
Dahan nodded and said, ‘I expected you to recognise it.’
‘Was a nice touch,’ said Hawkins.
‘Not one of mine,’ said Dahan. ‘I assumed you ordered it.’
Hawkins shook his head. ‘No.’
Rae got down on his knees and kissed the deck.
‘What in the name of the Eye are you doing, Rae?’
‘Thanking the Speranza, sir,’ said Rae. ‘Who else do you think did this for us? Told you the old girl would look out for us.’
Hawkins gave Dahan a quizzical look, but the Secutor seemed to accept Rae’s idea that the ship had wrought this arena to give them an advantage.
He shrugged. ‘As good as explanation as any, I suppose.’ he said. Figuring that was a mystery for another day, he gestured to the chanting skitarii fighting in the ruins.
‘Who’s Mataleo?’
‘I am,’ said Dahan.
‘I thought your first name was Hirimau.’
‘It is. Mataleo is what I believe you call a nickname.’
‘What does it mean?’ asked Rae.
‘Lion-killer,’ said Dahan. ‘A soubriquet I earned in my more organic days on Catachan. A soldier named Harker bestowed it upon me and its bellicosity appealed to the skitarii despite my best attempts to discourage its use.’
‘Outstanding,’ said Hawkins. Dahan had already won his respect, but earning a war-name from a Catachan? That was impressive.
‘I don’t suppose you saw any Cadian tanks on your way here?’
‘No, our paths did not intersect, but they are en route,’ said Dahan. ‘Assuming they encounter no resistance, they will arrive in twenty-seven minutes.’
‘Twenty-seven minutes, damn it all to the Eye,’ said Hawkins as more blasts of green fire streaked across the square and mushrooming explosions erupted along the Cadian line. Cries of pain and shouts for ammo echoed across the deck.
‘What in the Emperor’s name are you doing?’ said Hawkins, as Dahan stood and extended the crackling tines of his lower arms. ‘Get down!’
Dahan’s Cebrenian halberd pulsed with lethal energies as he climbed onto the crumbling ridge of debris. Flames licked around his clawed feet and his cloak snapped in the hot winds.
‘It is here,’ said Dahan.
‘What is?’ said Hawkins, peering through a gouge of vitrified plascrete. A host of crystalline warriors were advancing across the width of Angel Square. Broad and tall, each was armed with shimmering energy spines and long-bladed polearms that matched those of the Protectors.
At the centre of these elite killers was a towering thing of glass and crystal, a hideous amalgam of scorpion and centaur. Shield-bearers attended it. Las-fire and explosions bounced from their reflective shields.
‘The alpha-creature,’ said Dahan, springing onto the back of the Iron Fist. ‘Kill it and we regain the initiative.’
The vehicle’s engine revved madly, its machine-spirit eager to be loosed. Its tracks sprayed rubble as the vehicle crested the rise. Chem-rich exhaust fumes jetted from its rear vents.
‘You can’t fight that thing,’ shouted Hawkins.
The chanting skitarii bellowed the Secutor’s war-name as they marched out to fight alongside him.
‘Then you don’t know Mataleo,’ said Dahan.
The walls of the confero were no longer steel and glass, but an undulant vault of perfectly geometric cubes that formed an all-enclosing dome of impenetrable darkness. With Linya’s expulsion of Galatea from the shared neuromatrix, all pretence of reality had fallen away.
Hexamathic firewalls had thus far prevented the machine-hybrid from reaching them, keeping Linya and her fellow captives safe from its wrath.
Linya sat cross-legged in the centre of a circle of her fellow magi, the illusory retention of their physical forms the one concession to notions of three-dimensional space.
asked Syriestte, staring up at the rippling dome of interlocking cubes.
said Linya, keeping her binary simple. She’d exloaded enough hexamathic understanding into their speech centres to allow communication at a level beyond Galatea’s understanding, but it was still tryingly basic.
said Magos Natala from across the circle.
replied Linya.
She cast her gaze around the circle and, one by one, each magos gave a curt nod until only Syriestte remained.
said Linya,
Syriestte nodded and said,
Linya began with a recitation of the first, most basic prayer to the Omnissiah, each of the captive magi joining in as she spoke.
Volatile deletion algorithms emerged from Linya’s mouth, like the ectoplasmic emissions of a psyker. But this was no immaterial by-product; these were lethal combinations of spliced kill-codes.
Dormant for now, they twisted around her like glittering chains of droplets on spider-silk, moving outwards towards the magi.
Haephaestus was first to be touched. His back arched and he gave a cry of agonised binary as the kill-codes enmeshed with his mind. Next was Natala, who took the pain stoically, then Syriestte.
The largely organic features of the Mechanicus Envoy twisted in horrendous pain, her eyes going wide at the shock of it. The kill-code moved around the circle of magi, touching each one until it had bonded with all but Magos Kleinhenz.
A portion of the oil-dark barrier bulged inwards.
The black cubes expanded at a ferocious rate, rearranging their mass and density into the form of a hideous data-daemon pushing into the vault. Its arms ended in hooked talons and draconic wings spread at its back.
This was an image birthed in primal nightmares, something bestial from an age when humankind huddled in caves around dying fires. Its roar was inchoate and murderous. The talons wrapped around Magos Kleinhenz and dragged him from the circle. He thrashed in the data-daemon’s grip, his outline distorting with strobing after-images of his screaming face.
His cries descended into meaningless scraps of binaric fragments as he broke apart into drifting scads of data-light. Linya thrust her hands towards the data-daemon and shouted a canticle of hexamathic calculus.
It howled in pain as its nightmarish form was drawn back into the darkness, leaving the vault’s fluidly cubic perimeter rippling like the surface of a tar pit.
The last fragments of Kleinhenz drifted like fractal snowflakes. Haephaestus and Natala tried in vain to save some last aspect of their comrade, but it was already too late.
Syriestte turned to Linya, her organic face twisted in grief
.
she said.
said Linya.
said Natala.
answered Linya.
said Magos Haephaestus bitterly.
said Linya with the coldest steel in her voice.
said Syriestte.
asked Haephaestus.
said Linya, allowing the last vestige of her surroundings to fall away from her perceptions.
Just as she had sent a sliver of her consciousness into the datasphere to make contact with her father, Linya now sent her mind into the fulminate-bright realm of the Speranza’s informational landscape.
She closed her eyes and…
…found herself amid brilliant grid lines of data as they passed through the Ark Mechanicus in the Speranza’s hidden space of knowledge. Constellations of starfire surrounded her, brighter than she had ever seen them. Dazzling in the purity of the wealth of understanding stored within each and every pinprick of illumination.
The last time Linya had flown the datascape it had been a hallucinatory place of shared functionality. Phosphor-bright with continental-scale cores of learning and informational exchange.
Now it was a battleground.
Datacores burned with searing intensity, like supernovae on the verge of explosion. The last time Linya had seen them they had been dull with parasitic infestation, thick with Galatea’s self-replicating strangleholds. The machine-hybrid had held the Mechanicus hostage with its control of every vital system.