Page 36 of Gods of Mars

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sneered Telok.

Kotov laughed.

conceded Kotov, feeling the presences he had sensed as the Speranza dragged him down rising to meet him.

said Kotov as glittering dataforms of Linya Tychon and Abrehem Locke appeared at his side.

Once the bane of Kotov’s life, Abrehem Locke wavered like a distorted hologram, his outline blurred where motes of darkness drifted from his body like ash from a cindered corpse. Linya Tychon was restored, her skin unblemished once again where the fire in Amarok had crippled her and whole where Galatea had mutilated her. She turned to Kotov and it seemed as though a multitude of overlaid spirits stared out through her eyes.

laughed Telok.

said Linya.

Telok shrugged, as if the answer was of no interest.

promised Linya.

Telok sighed, but it was a distraction only.

He hurled himself at Kotov, fast as thought.

Physics held no sway here, only imagination. Wounded, Kotov dropped through layers of data, informational light skimming past at superliminal speeds. Telok followed him down, constructing calculus proofs of space-time curvature to increase his speed. Kotov led him through canyons of databases, where information passed back and forth in collimated streams of data-dense light. The sense of movement and velocity was intoxicating.

Abrehem and Linya spiralled around Telok in a double helix. She clawed at Telok’s experiential armour, stripping it from him in long chains of boolean notation. Hexamathic blades, against which Telok had no protection, stabbed into him.

Ancient technology unknown to the Adeptus Mechanicus batted her away as Telok’s vast intellect surged to the fore. Abrehem flew in close to Telok and the golden fire that had burned Galatea’s vile touch from the Speranza seared into Telok’s form.

Telok howled in rage as his shields of logarithmic complexity were burned away. A mastery of nanotechnology, the likes of which Abrehem was utterly ill-equipped to comprehend, sent his attacker spinning away.

roared Telok, hurling searing bolts of cold logic at Kotov.

Kotov spun away from Telok’s fire, rising from the database canyons and looping around a soaring column of engine cores, where the impossible calculations to breach the barriers of the warp were agreed upon.

said Kotov, turning aside from yet more of Telok’s searing projectiles.

He thrust his hands out before him and a glittering shield of pure logic reflected Telok’s attacks back at him. Telok roared in pain as the two archmagi came together in an explosion of fractal light. Circling the engine datacore and bathing in its bewildering, non-linear solutions, they came apart and smashed together again and again.

Gods of data and knowledge, their wisdom gave them power.

All they had learned and all they had explored. Every belief, every expression of wonder. All were transformed into killing thoughts. Chains of accumulated knowledge tore aetherial bodies, words as weapons, digits as ammunition.

They fell through the datascape, plunging into the heart of sun-hot datacores, emerging in streamers of light that were drawn into their death struggle. The battle left a burning wake in the Speranza’s heart as they spun around one another like gravity-locked comets, inextricably linked and plunging to mutual self-annihilation.

They fought like two alpha males vying for dominance.

And as the alchemists of Old Earth had always known: as above, so below. Where they fought the Speranza shuddered with sympathetic agonies.

In the portside testing arrays every single experimental weapon system activated without warning and blew a three-hundred-metre tear in the hull.

A ventral chem-store went into a feedback loop in its mix ratios and crafted a lethal bio-toxin that was only prevented from entering the ship’s filtration systems by the last-minute intervention of a nameless lexmechanic.

Forge-temples whose alpha-numeric designations contained the data-packet of 00101010 had their libraries wiped, condemning millennia of accumulated learning to dust.

All across the Speranza the collateral damage of their battle was tearing the ship apart.

Linya and Abrehem followed in the wake of the devastation, barely able to keep pace with the two warring gods. Though they were gifted in their own ways, neither had the accumulated wisdom and experience of an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Finally, weary and stripped of their most prominent aspects of genius, Telok and Kotov came apart above a deep datacore of molten gold. They bled light, mercury bright, and ashen memories of things once known drifted from them like tomb dust.

said Telok, his black robes in tatters.

answered Kotov, feeling himself ebb with each utterance.

Linya and Abrehem finally caught up to Kotov and Telok, putting themselves in the dead space between the two archmagi.

said Linya.

said Abrehem.

they said in unison.

Linya hurled herself at Telok, Abrehem at Kotov.

Both struck at the same instant, and Kotov felt the essence of Abrehem Locke’s Machine-touched spirit merge with every aspect of him. He felt as though his body was transformed, his perceptions turned inside out. Hard logic and reason blended with intuition and lateral thinking in ways he had never considered.

Kotov looked up and saw the same process under way within Telok as Linya Tychon merged herself with the core of his very being.

But where the union of spirits had been beneficial to Kotov, the opposite was true for Telok. His inner workings laid bare like a clockwork automaton on a workbench, Kotov saw why instantly. Linya Tychon was not simply Linya Tychon, but a spirit-host of vengeful tech-priests.

Each of whom bore within them a lethal hexamathic kill-code.

Telok howled as it was loosed within him, a viral fire against which he had no defence. It ravaged his systems, wiping decades of learning every second. Constantly evolving in self-replicating lattices, the kill-code transferred itself from system to system within Telok’s internal system-architecture.

It destroyed everything it touched, reducing his vast databases to howling nonsense code and rendering the accumulated knowledge of centuries of study to irrelevant noise.

Telok’s form twisted as the viral conflagration burned him alive from the inside out. His screams were those of a man who could feel everything he ever was being systematically ripped away.

But Telok was an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and even as Kotov watched, he was adapting, excising and rewriting his own internal structure to halt the cancerous spread of the kill-code.

Now, Archmagos Kotov, said a voice within him.

Locke.

You have the power of the Machine-touched now. Use it.

Kotov lifted his hands to
wards the molten gold of the datacore, feeling something indefinable move within him. It was power, but power unlike anything he had known before. Power like the first of the Binary Saints were said to have wielded, the ability to commune with machines as equals. To walk with them as gods on the Akashic planes on the road to Singularity.

Kotov drew on the light of the datacore.

And the Speranza’s soul poured into him.

Kotov’s eyes were burning discs of golden light, the secret fire that only suns know, the spark that ignited the universe. From first to last, he knew everything.

Everything.

Shimmering armour of gold and silver encased Kotov, battleplate as titanic and ornate as any worn by the legendary primarchs or even the Emperor Himself.

A sword of fire appeared in his hand, its hilt and winged quillons forming a two-headed eagle wrought in lustrous gold.

Pure knowledge, weaponised wisdom.

Telok writhed as he purged himself of the kill-code.

Almost nothing remained of it, but it had done what Linya intended, stripping Telok of vast swathes of armoured knowledge.

said Kotov.

He plunged the blazing sword into Telok’s heart.

This was the end of all things.

The mon-keigh believed the End Times would come in a tide of battle and blood, of returned gods and the doom of empires. Even the eldar myth cycles spoke of a time called the Rhana Dandra, when the Phoenix Lords would return for the last great dance of death.

Bielanna knew of no species with legends that spoke of things simply ending. Where was the mythological drama in that?

The skein’s golden symmetry was unravelling, the futures collapsing. The fates of all living beings were unweaving from the great tapestry of existence. Entropy in the material world was mirrored in the skein, and its shimmering matrix was falling apart as the tear in space-time caused by Archmagos Telok ripped wider.

Bielanna plunged into the heart of the maelstrom of breaking futures, her spirit a shimmering ghost in the skein. The spirits within Bielanna quailed at being within the skein. Their fear was understandable. No longer protected from She Who Thirsts by their spirit stones, they feared the fate that had befallen Uldanaish Ghostwalker. They were warriors and the skein was a mystery to those who wore the war-mask; how could they possibly understand what she attempted?

With her body of flesh and blood no more, every moment in the skein was eroding her spirit’s existence. Only by the power her kin had freely given her was she here at all. If they died, she died and every sacrifice, every drop of blood shed would have been in vain.

Bielanna felt Tariquel steady them by reciting the Swans of Isha’s Mercy, the dance he had performed for Prince Yriel in the Dome of Autumn Twilight. His faith in her was an anchor to which the others could cling. She heard other voices too, Vaynesh and Ariganna Icefang, each adding their belief in her to her strength.

She whispered a thank you that shimmered in the weave and became part of its structure.

Bielanna followed the skein’s collapsing paths, walls of imagined gold and light folding in as the futures they represented no longer held any meaning to the universe. Bielanna flew though the destruction like the wildest Saim-Hann autarch, twisting through collapsing webways, pushing ever deeper into the psychic network.

Pathways closed behind her. Ways ahead snapped shut the instant before she took them. Swarms of warp spiders billowed from their lairs, skittering in their millions towards the few remaining paths into the future.

Cracks in the walls blew out like the ruptured hull of a wounded wraithship. The howling Chaos in the empty spaces beyond called to her, the laughter of She Who Thirsts and the whispered intrigues of the Changer of the Ways.

She felt their pull on her soul, but sped on, hardened to resist such blandishments.

Everywhere she looked, the potential futures were narrowing to a vanishingly small number. Bielanna wept to see the universe’s potential so cruelly snuffed out. To wipe out the future by design was a scheme of purest evil, but to erase it unknowingly… that was the act of a fool.

Another path into the future slammed shut, a billion times a billion unborn lives denied their chance to exist. Bielanna despaired as the skein folded in on itself everywhere she turned. With every slamming door, that despair threatened to overwhelm her and extinguish her spirit entirely. Bielanna wept as she realised she could see no way onwards. Every route was sealing ahead of her and closing off every avenue of hope.

Hope…

Yes, hope was the key.

Because other farseers must have seen this.

To believe otherwise spoke of great arrogance on her part. But if they had, why had none of them taken any action to prevent this universal extinction event from coming to pass?

Then Bielanna realised at least one of them already had.

After all, she was here right now in this moment.

Had her entire life been manipulated to bring her to this point?

Was she as much a pawn in some greater game as the lesser races of the galaxy were to her? Mon-keigh worlds were burned and their populaces consigned to death by the decrees of the farseers for the sake of a single eldar life.

If it was meant to be that Bielanna was here, then it was because a seer council on some distant craftworld had foreseen it and had placed her here at just this moment, for just this purpose.

She wanted to hate these unknown farseers. She wanted so badly to hate them for consigning her and her kin to death. For denying her children their chance to be born.

But she could not.

She understood the cold logic at the heart of such a decision. She had made similar choices, knowing that by enacting them she was consigning sentient beings to death. Even the greatest seers could not see just how far the ramifications of their choices might reach.

That she was here at all told Bielanna that at least one seer had seen that she might prevent this cataclysm from coming to pass. And with that thought, the despair vanished like breath on cold wraithbone.

Bielanna saw one last path before her, a slender future that yet resisted extinction. Her spirit soared as she flew towards it, trailing a glittering stream of psychic light behind her. Bielanna blazed into this last path in the final instants of its existence.

Like threading the eye of a needle.

Archmagos Kotov opened his eyes and took a great, sucking breath of air, amazed he could actually do so. He blinked away the shimmering memory of a place of light and wonder, a place where there were no limits on the power of thought and the glories it could achieve.

The hulking form of Archmagos Telok filled his vision, his lunatic face frozen in an expression of hatred.

It took him a moment to comprehend that Telok was dead, that he, in fact, had somehow killed him. The face of the Lost Magos had always been artificial and unnatural, waxy with its plasticised textures and unknown juvenats, but now it was entirely crystalline.

He tried to pull away from that icy glare, but found himself locked in place by a bladed fist that skewered him to the Speranza’s command throne.

‘Ah, of course,’ he said. ‘Telok has killed me too.’

‘Not quite,’ said a voice at his shoulder. ‘Though he gave it his best shot to kill both of us.’

‘Tarkis?’

‘Indeed so, archmagos,’ said Blaylock. ‘Now, please, hold still while we cut you loose.’

Kotov tried to turn his head, but the blades pinning him in place kept him from moving. He felt the presence of others around him, but could not identify them, his senses still aligned to another place, another reality. He heard a high-pitched buzzing sound, a plasma cutter biting into glass.

‘I thought you were dead, Tarkis.’

‘As did I,’ replied Blaylock. ‘But rumours of my death, etcetera, etcetera. Telok incapacitated me with what I assume was some form of post-hypnotic command,
buried within his overload attack when he destroyed our escort ships. Regrettably, I did not recognise the danger until it was too late.’

‘The same could be said for all of us,’ said Kotov. ‘The Speranza? Is it still ours?’

Blaylock nodded. ‘Reports are still coming in, archmagos, but, yes, it appears the enemy attack has stalled with Telok’s demise.’

Glass snapped with a brittle crack as the plasma cutter sliced through the last of Telok’s claws.

‘Ave Deus Mechanicus!’ cried Kotov as bio-feedback sent shock waves of pain around his ruined body.

‘All clear, Master Yael,’ said Blaylock.

Telok moved, but not through any animating force of his own. Like the statue of a freshly deposed ethnarch, Archmagos Telok was toppled by the equally hulking form of a Space Marine. He hit the deck hard and shattered into a thousand pieces, fragments of dull, lifeless crystal skidding across the deck and spilling tiny fragments of cubic nano-machinery.

‘What did you do to Telok?’ said Roboute Surcouf, bending with a grimace of pain to retrieve a long, dagger-like shard of crystal remains. ‘One minute we were getting horribly killed, the next he stabs you then turns to glass.’

The rogue trader’s face was a mass of bruised purple, and from the way he held himself, it was clear his collarbone was broken, as well as several ribs and probably his arm.

‘I…’ began Kotov, but his words trailed off. ‘I fought him in the datasphere, but I wasn’t alone. Mistress Tychon and Bondsman Locke were there too. Without them I would be dead.’

Kotov looked down at his ruined chest, a mass of shattered bio-organic circuitry and floodstream chemicals.

‘Diagnostic: it appears I was correct in my initial assessment. Why am I not dead? Damage from this blow should have killed me.’

‘You are correct in surmising that you should be dead,’ said Blaylock. ‘That you are not speaks volumes as to the singular nature of your experience within the datascape. Perhaps you will illuminate me as to its nature?’

‘One day, Tarkis,’ agreed Kotov, allowing himself to be helped from the command throne. ‘But not now. Telok is dead, but what of his army and the Breath of the Gods? What of the tear in space-time?’

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