He rested his elbow on the gunwale, and the material moulded itself to the contours of his limb. It felt warm, and he lifted his arm away. The surface reshaped to its original form, and a glowing impression of Roboute’s fingers and palm remained, slowly fading as he watched.
‘You’re a well-travelled man, Master Surcouf,’ said Ven Anders, balancing his rifle across his knees as he took a seat next to Roboute. ‘Have you seen anything like this ship?’
‘Call me Roboute, and no, I haven’t.’
‘Not even among the eldar?’
Roboute shook his head. ‘There’s a superficial similarity, yes, but there’s something a little… vulgar about this.’
‘Vulgar? This? It’s beautiful,’ said Anders. ‘Even a dour son of Cadia like me can appreciate that much.’
‘There’s an effortlessness to eldar craftsmanship that no human can match,’ said Roboute. ‘This feels like someone trying too hard to emulate it.’
‘Ordinarily I’d report a man to the commissars for xenos sympathies like that,’ said Anders. ‘But seeing as you’re a scoundrel of a rogue trader, I think I can let you off this time.’
‘Decent of you, Colonel Anders.’
‘Ven,’ said Anders as the shadow of vast, iron-clad structures swallowed them. Both men looked up, turning their attention to the artificial canyon through which the ship sailed. Sheer cliffs of iron soared upwards, ribboned with hundreds of snaking pipes and cable runs. They clung to every building and laced overhead like vines in a rainforest. They thrummed with power.
Squealing pistons, the roar of venting gases and the relentless, grinding crunch of enormous machine gears echoed from all around. Booming hammerblows of distant construction temples and a seismic throb of subterranean labours filled the air. The planet’s heartbeat. Roboute felt his bones vibrate in time with the pulse of worldwide industry.
The ship’s course threaded between monolithic blocks of metallic towers, beneath arches of latticework scaffolds and along curving expressways. On suspended gantries and within those structures open to the elements, Roboute saw innumerable toiling servitors, like ants in a glass-fronted colony.
They were withered things with so little flesh left upon them they were practically automatons. Fettered gangs of them turned great cog-wheels, hauled on enormous chains or climbed grand processional steps in grim lockstep, coming from who knew where to reach their next allotted task.
Was this the crew of the Tomioka?
Labouring alongside the servitors were thousands of the things Telok had called crystaliths. Some retained humanoid form, albeit in a glassy and unfinished fashion, while others adopted whatever bodyplan best suited their current task.
Roboute caught a glimpse of a gigantic crystalith moving between two golden-capped pyramid structures, undulant and centipede-like. Easily the equal of a Reaver Titan in scale.
‘Did you see that?’ said Anders.
‘I did.’
‘Having Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica striding behind us would make me feel a lot better,’ said Roboute.
‘And I wouldn’t say no to Vilka scouting the flanks either,’ said Anders. ‘Have they a new princeps for Amarok yet?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Roboute. ‘Ever since Hypatia, the Legio’s pretty much locked itself away.’
Anders nodded, glancing up as a flaring arc of corposant danced along the structural elements of the adjacent building. Flaring vent towers belched gouts of flame and smoke. Petrochemical stink descended. Flashes of lightning arcing between dirigibles threw shadows on the walls.
‘That storm’s getting nearer,’ said Roboute, squinting through his fingers at the lowering sky. Dark bands of toxin-laden clouds were sinking downwards.
‘Looks that way,’ agreed Ven Anders.
‘You think it’ll be dangerous?’
‘I think everything’s dangerous.’
Roboute laughed, then saw Anders was completely serious.
‘Then let me say that you look very relaxed for a man in a high state of readiness.’
‘That’s the Cadian way,’ said Anders.
No two structures of Exnihlio were alike, and Roboute struggled to ascribe purpose to them. Some had the appearance of forges, others of colossal power stations. Some appeared unfinished, yet more were abandoned or had otherwise fallen into ruin.
Something struck Roboute as odd about the city, something that had been niggling at him ever since they’d landed. The buildings were pure function, very much like the Speranza, but with one important difference. As ugly as the Ark Mechanicus was, it was still unmistakably a vessel of the Martian priesthood, thanks to its wealth of iconography. Cog-toothed skulls, mortis angels, scriptural binary and mechanised frescoes adorned any space not given over to pure practicality.
Part stamp of authority, part theatre, it was impossible for any servant of the Emperor to escape the grim imagery so beloved of Terra and Mars.
‘Where are all the skulls?’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Anders.
‘The skulls,’ repeated Roboute. ‘Since we landed, I haven’t seen a single cogged skull, no symbols of the Mechanicus at all.’
‘And nor will you, Master Surcouf,’ called Telok from the steersman’s lectern. ‘Not while I am master of Exnihlio.’
Roboute turned to face the archmagos. He hadn’t whispered, but neither had he exactly spoken aloud. The city’s din should have easily swallowed Roboute’s words, but perhaps Telok’s aural augmentations allowed him to tune out the background noise.
‘And why is that?’ he asked.
‘I am beyond the galaxy, beyond the Mechanicus,’ said Telok, and it seemed to Roboute as though the words of the archmagos resonated from the structure of the crystal ship.
Kotov glanced up in concern at Telok’s provocative words.
‘I built everything you see here, Master Surcouf. Me, not the Mechanicus and not the Imperium. Why waste resources and time on needless ornamentations when there are none to see them and so much great work to be done? The Breath of the Gods has shown me how lost the Mechanicus have become, how little they remember of their former greatness. I will restore that to them. I will save Mars from itself!’
The room was dark, but Linya Tychon changed that with a thought. Soft illumination rose up, sourceless and without haste. The room was spartanly furnished: just a bed, a recessed rail with her robes hanging from it, a writing desk, a terminal with a moulded plastic chair in front of it and a modest ablutions cubicle.
She pulled back the bedclothes and sat up, swinging her legs out onto the floor. It was warm underfoot. Linya blinked away the remnants of a bad dream, something unpleasant, but already fading. She placed her hands on her temples, looking strangely at her fingertips as though she expected to see something.
Shaking her head, Linya poured water from a copper ewer into a plastic cup. She didn’t recall there having been water beside her bed, nor even a table and cup, but took a drink anyway.
The water was cool and pure, as if only recently collected from a mountain spring or the depths of an ancient glacier. It quenched the immediate thirst, but didn’t feel like it refreshed her.
She stood and selected a robe, pulling it over her head and wriggling into it before pulling the waist cinch tight. Pouring another cup of water, she sat on the plastic chair before the terminal and pulled up the previous cycle of the Gallery’s survey inloads. Kilometres-long detection devices encircling the Quatria Gallery stared unblinking into space, gathering vast quantities of data on far distant celestial phenomena.
But data only meant something once it had been interpreted.
Linya’s eyes scanned the scrolling columns of figures, blink-capturing interesting segments of the sky, particularly the distant star formations in the Perseus arm of the galaxy, where the first pulse-star had been discovered.
Linya let the data wash through her, noting times and distances with each swipe of a page. So far, nothing unusual. She tapped a hand on
the wall beside her, and a portion of the wall faded to transparency, creating an aperture that looked out onto the void and glittering stars. Not a real window, of course, simply a pict representation of what lay beyond her insulated and armoured chamber. Having a real window was too much of a risk. Ablation cascade effects from a long-ended void-conflict had made the orbital tracks of Quatria lousy with fragments, rendering the planet below essentially unreachable.
Only an emergency boost into a graveyard orbit and rigorously maintained shield protocols had kept the Quatria Gallery intact in the aftermath of the fighting. The Mechanicus had wanted to abandon the Gallery, to scrap the machinery and repurpose it to more profitable areas of research, but Vitali Tychon had point-blank refused to mothball his beloved observatory.
Thinking of her father, Linya pulled up a three-dimensional representation of the Gallery’s internal structure – two spinning cones linked at their tips by a slender connecting passageway, and vast spans of far-reaching detection arrays radiating from their flat bases. The staff of the Quatria Gallery was minimal, just Linya, her father, six lexmechanics and a handful of servitors.
Linya frowned. Vitali’s icon was not aboard.
‘Where are you, father?’ she muttered.
Perhaps he was outside the station, repairing a misaligned mirror or shield relay, but she doubted it. That was servitor work. In any case, her father disliked venturing beyond the station’s interior if he didn’t have to. And even if he had, he would have informed her of his intention to go outside.
Linya pressed a finger to her ear and said, ‘Father? Can you hear me?’
A faint wash of static, like the caress of waves over sand, was her only answer. Linya frowned and turned to the faux window, using the haptic implants on her fingertips to sweep the exterior picters around the station. The metal skin of the Quatria Gallery was granite-coloured flexsteel, rippling with undersea reflections from the enclosing energy fields. Linya panned the view around, hunting for the crab-like vehicle they used to manoeuvre around the hull and repair anything that needed fixing.
She found it easily enough, still moored to one of the upper transit hubs. Haloed by a corona of light from the planet below.
A breath of something cold passed over Linya’s neck and she turned her chair. The door to her room was open, which was unusual. Few enough of them lived aboard the Gallery to require anything approaching privacy, but old habits died hard. Linya found it hard to imagine she’d left the door open.
‘Is there someone there?’ she asked.
No one answered, but then they wouldn’t, would they?
She rose from the chair and locked her terminal. She turned to the window, but her hand making the haptic gesture to close it froze when she saw something unusual.
Or, rather, when she didn’t see something unusual.
Quatria was a mostly inert rock, a rust-red ball of iron oxide and tholeiitic basalt. On most cycles, it was visible as though through a haze of mist, the result of the ever-growing mass in the debris cascade.
Linya now saw the planet as she had not seen it for decades, with pin-sharp clarity and clearly defined terrain features.
Breath sighed over her neck again, and she spun around. It felt like someone was standing right behind her. A half-glimpsed outline of a shape moved at the edge of her door. Too quick to be recognised.
‘Wait!’ called Linya.
She crossed the room quickly and stepped out into the corridor. Bare metal curved away in both directions, but a whisper of cloth on steel drew her gaze to the right. Another flicker of movement. Linya set off after the shape, not even sure what she was chasing or what she expected to find.
The Mechanicus weren’t given to playing jokes on one another, and it seemed wholly unlikely there was an intruder aboard. Any ship would have been detected months before it reached them. And what could an intruder hope to gain from boarding covertly?
Linya paused at a junction of passageways, seeking any sign of the figure she’d seen earlier.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is there anyone here?’
Silence answered her. Quatria was a large station, but not so large and complex in its internal arrangement that it would be easy to lose someone. Without her father’s presence she knew she should feel very alone. The servitors and lexmechanics provided no companionship, but strangely she felt anything but alone.
It felt as though there were unseen eyes upon her. As intrusive as being covertly observed ought to be, Linya felt no threat, merely a weary sadness.
‘Who are you?’ she said to the darkness. ‘And how did you get aboard Quatria?’
Maddening silence surrounded her, and Linya balled her fists.
‘What have you done with my father? Where is Vitali?’ she demanded, feeling a moment of intense sadness at the mention of her father’s name.
Linya turned as she heard soft footfalls behind her.
A magos in a black robe stood in the centre of the corridor, his hands laced before him and his head concealed beneath a hood of impenetrable shadows. Only the soft shimmer of a pair of silver eyes hinted at augmetics beneath.
The presences Linya felt observing her retreated, fearful of this individual. She didn’t know him, but was instinctively wary.
said the adept, speaking an archaic form of binary, one she had last heard in the ossuary reliquaries of the Schiaparelli Sorrow.
she asked, phrasing her answer in the same canted form.
The adept sighed.
admitted Linya,
said the figure.
said Linya, though a horrible suspicion was forming in her mind.
said the adept.
agreed the adept.
said Linya.
said the adept.
said the adept.
Linya heard falsehood in the adept’s words, but also truth. She had been hurt, hadn’t she? Badly hurt. She felt dizzy and reached out to steady herself on the wall as her legs felt suddenly powerless to support her. The wall was warm beneath her fingertips. That warmth turned to searing heat, and Linya snatched her hand back from the wall.
she said, sensing a memory groping for the surface. She pushed it down, not yet ready to face such pain.
said the adept.
said Linya.
br /> She felt the unseen eyes willing her not to continue down this road. Linya ignored them. She had never been one for shying away from hard facts or inconvenient truths.
he said.
The adept nodded and stepped towards the wall.
With hands that looked as though they were made of dozens of scalpel blades bound together with copper wire, the adept drew the outline of a window in the wall. Antiseptic light shone through, stark and unforgiving.
Linya edged towards the light, feeling the drag of the unseen observers as they wordlessly screamed at her to retreat. Every step felt like she was walking towards an executioner’s block, but she had willed this resolution. She couldn’t back down now.
She edged closer to the light, and looked out through the window. What she was seeing made no sense without memory to frame it and give it context.
As easily as a key turns in a lock, those memories returned in an instant as the gates of her hippocampus were stormed by synaptic flares exploding in her cerebral cortex.
Linya saw a body lying on bloodstained sheets, a body with her face. A body with the skull pared open and the cranial vault excised of brain matter.
In a singular moment of horror, Linya remembered exactly where she was and what Galatea had done to her.
The corridor was ten metres wide, ribbed with pilasters of latticed green steelwork. A vault of leering gargoyles arched overhead, water droplets falling from rusted rivets and the lips of half-hidden statues in secluded alcoves. The company of Cadians jogged beneath them at battle pace, keeping their attention firmly fixed on the route ahead.