‘Vitali tried subtle,’ said Siavash. ‘I don’t do subtle.’
The boy drew his pistol and aimed it right at the heart of Galatea. Blaylock felt a moment of real fear as he saw a heavily converted Maukren Flensar with integral phosphex coils to increase muzzle velocity and impact trauma. Anything struck by that weapon would be gutted by a white-hot, fist-to-finger plasma core.
‘If we were you, we would put that gun down,’ said Galatea.
‘I’m going to burn you alive,’ said Siavash, his finger curling through the trigger guard.
‘No!’ cried Blaylock, rising from the throne.
‘For Linya,’ said Siavash, and fired the Maukren.
The weapon exploded, engulfing the boy’s hand in a blooming corona of blue-hot flame. Too fast for the human eye to follow, the phosphex slithered up his arm like a living thing. It leapt onto his torso, billowing flames roaring and seething like an enraged predator.
‘Adara! Throne, no!’ screamed Sylkwood, tearing off her battered jerkin and attempting to beat the flames out. The jerkin instantly burst into flames as the overpowering heat from the flames forced the enginseer back.
‘Help him!’ shouted Nader, pulling Sylkwood away from the fire.
Blaylock shook his head. Phosphex could devour flesh and turn bones to grease in moments. The boy was already past saving.
Siavash dropped to the deck, dying without screams, the flames having seared the oxygen from his lungs. Localised fire suppression systems deployed from the deck and sprayed the burning body with a fire-retardant foam that hardened like a scab and starved the blaze of oxygen.
Emil Nader and Sylkwood supported each other, staring in hatred at Galatea, which watched the young boy’s ending dispassionately, arms folded across its chest.
‘Emperor damn you, Tarkis Blaylock,’ said Nader. ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’
‘Me? I did nothing,’ said Blaylock.
‘Exactly my point.’
‘I did nothing because there was nothing that could be done. The boy was dead the moment he pulled the trigger.’
Sylkwood threw off Nader’s grip and strode towards Galatea.
‘You did that,’ she said. ‘You fouled the firing mechanism or twisted the gun’s war-spirit or did something that made it misfire. You’ve got Blaylock cowed, but I promise you that when this is all over, I’ll be there to see you die.’
‘Brave words for a biological entity whose unexceptional brain we could boil within her skull,’ said Galatea, leaning forwards, its silver eyes glittering like the ferryman’s coins. ‘Shall we show you how painful that would be?’
‘Enough,’ said Blaylock. ‘There will be no more death today. Mister Nader, I suggest you remove Magos Tychon and Enginseer Sylkwood from the bridge. Nothing good can come from further confrontation.’
Nader shot a venomous look at Galatea before nodding and taking Sylkwood’s arm. For a moment, Blaylock thought the Cadian might do something foolish. But foolish and Cadian didn’t go together, and she spat on the deck at Galatea’s feet before turning towards Blaylock.
‘You’re a real piece of work, Magos Blaylock,’ she said. ‘You know that, right?’
Blaylock said nothing. Sylkwood’s statement was too obtuse and vague to warrant a reply. In any case, it seemed she didn’t expect one, for she turned and marched from the bridge.
Vitali Tychon’s head remained bowed in defeat, and Blaylock felt a genuine stab of sympathy for the venerable cartographer.
‘Magos Tychon, I–’
‘Don’t, Tarkis,’ said Vitali. ‘Just don’t. Kotov told me we were looking for new stars, but that thing has just snuffed out the brightest star I knew.’
‘You are wrong, Magos Tychon,’ said Galatea. ‘Your daughter burns just as bright inside me. Trouble us again and we will snuff out her essence as easily as we extinguished the boy.’
‘Shut up!’ shouted Blaylock. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, shut up!’
Too vast to comprehend, too artificial to be natural, the spherical volume beneath the layered skin of the dome was a wonder of engineering. Surpassing any geodesic vault on Terra, it was, quite simply, the most impressive feat of structural mechanics Kotov had ever seen.
The Imperial explorators stood on an equatorial gantry that encircled the spherical void gouged in the planet’s bedrock. Many others encircled the chamber above and below them, with jutting piers and scaffolds of unknown machinery cantilevered into space.
The mass of a small moon had been dug from Exnihlio, and the surface of the excavated volume was encrusted with technology unlike anything seen on Mars. Angular glyphs like temple icons were graven in the curves of the chamber, rendered in a language that was at once familiar yet inhuman.
Thousands of crystaliths of all shapes and descriptions crawled across the inner surfaces of the void, engaged in maintenance, calibration and who knew what else. An ochre miasma, rank with the foetor of turned earth and exposed rock, drifted up though a shaft bored down through the base of the chamber.
A venting system, drainage? Who could tell?
Yet the magnificence of the space paled to insignificance when measured against the incredible appearance of that which it enclosed.
The Breath of the Gods hung suspended in the exact centre of the space, a vast, threshing, interweaving gyre of glittering metal blades that seemed to have no supporting structure at its core, just an achingly bright nexus of fractal incandescence. Like the first instant of a supernova or a glittering map of synaptic architecture.
Though Kotov’s visual augments were among the most sophisticated conceived by the molecular grinders of the Euryphaessan forges, he could form no coherent impression of the device’s exact dimensions. Geometric assayers flashed error codes to his glassine retinas with each failed attempt to quantify what he was seeing.
Like a tubular hurricane of silver leaves, the Breath of the Gods formed an elongated elliptical outline that defied easy assimilation. Its very existence was subtly discordant, as though some innate property of the human brain knew this device was somehow wrong, as though it abused every tenet of thermodynamics with spiteful relish.
Its complex internal topography was a squirming mass of pulsating metal that Kotov’s senses told him should be impossible. Portions of the colossal machine appeared to co-exist in the same space, moving through one another in violation of perspective.
Even those not reconfigured by the Adeptus Mechanicus found the machine disquieting to look upon. More so, it appeared. A number of Cadians doubled over to empty the contents of their stomachs across the perforated gantry. Idly, Kotov speculated as to the effect their dripping vomitus might have on the alien technology worked into the surfaces below.
Even the unsubtle minds of the Black Templars were enraptured by the sight of the device. Sergeant Tanna raised a hand as through reaching for it, while his white-helmed champion gripped the hilt of his black sword.
The machine – though Kotov’s sensibilities rebelled at the notion of labelling something so clearly beyond current Mechanicus paradigms with such a mundane term – had an aura within this colossal space that went beyond the simply mechanical.
It seemed (and here Kotov’s mind did rebel) to have a presence akin to a living being, as though it looked back at the tiny specks of consciousness beneath it and was content to allow them to bask in its wondrous impossibility.
Kotov shook off the notion, but like a shard of stubbornly invasive scrapcode, it could not be dismissed.
‘It’s…’ started Kotov, but he had not the words to describe what he was feeling. ‘It’s…’
Telok appeared at his side, a hulking presence whose crystalline elements shimmered with reflected light from the inconstant flux of the machinery above him.
‘I understand,’ said Telok. ‘It takes time to adapt to the singular nature of the device. For a human mind, even one enhanced by the Mechanicus, to grasp its complexity requires so thorough a remapping of the synaptic pathways an
d subsequent cognitive evolution that it can scarcely be called human anymore.’
Kotov nodded in wonder, barely hearing Telok, his eyes constantly drawn to the Breath of the Gods’ discomfiting aspect. It felt like the machine exerted some irresistible pull on his senses, as though demanding to be the sole focus of all who stood in its presence.
‘You found it…’ Kotov managed at last.
‘I did,’ affirmed Telok.
‘How? It was a myth, a barely remembered legend from the hidden manuscripts of madmen and heretics.’
‘By following the clues left by its builders,’ said Telok, walking around the gently curved gantry, forcing Kotov and the others to follow him. ‘Those madmen were once seekers after truth like us, men who uncovered those truths but whose minds were ill-equipped to process their significance.’
‘So who was it that built this?’ asked Roboute Surcouf, with a tone that suggested he might know the answer.
‘An ancient race whose identity has long since been forgotten by the inexorable obscurity of time,’ said Telok, waving a dismissive hand, as though who had built the machine was less important than who now controlled it. ‘Whatever they called themselves, they passed through our galaxy millions of years ago. They were godlike beings, sculpting the matter of the universe to suit their desires with technology far beyond anything you could possibly imagine. They came here, perhaps hoping to begin the process anew, extending the limits of this innocuous spiral cluster of star-systems. They thought to connect all the universe with stepping stones of newly wrought galaxies they would build from the raw materials scattered by the ekpyrotic creation of space-time itself.’
‘So what happened to this race of gods?’ asked Ven Anders, nervously glancing up at the rotating flurry of machinery. ‘If they were so powerful, why aren’t they still here? Why haven’t we heard of them before?’
‘Because, Colonel Anders, nothing is ever really immortal, not even the gods themselves,’ said Telok. ‘In truth, I do not know exactly what happened to them, but in the deep vaults of this world I found fragmentary evidence of a weaponised psychic bio-agent that escaped its long imprisonment and destroyed the genius of their minds, reducing them to the level of beasts. Within a generation of the first infection, they had all but wiped themselves out.’
Telok paused, moving to the edge of the gantry, looking up at the swirling mass of silver and crackling arcs of elemental power with a look of rapture.
‘It is my belief that with the last of their faculties, these gods set the device to become self-sustaining and self-repairing, shutting down all but its most basic functions until either far-flung survivors of their race returned to claim it or a species arose with the capacity to be their inheritors. I humbly submit that I am that inheritor.’
Telok now turned his gaze on Kotov, and the archmagos saw an expression that suggested anything but humility. His cognitive processes ran hot as he struggled to keep pace with what he was hearing. Fighting to keep his awe and unease in check, Kotov’s analytical faculties came to the fore and found much in Telok’s explanations that simply did not match his understanding of universal laws.
‘And you claim that this is the device responsible for the celestial engineering events we witnessed at Katen Venia and Hypatia?’
‘Claim?’ said Telok. ‘You doubt my word on this?’
Kotov heard the threat in Telok’s voice and carefully framed his next words as a question of science, not character.
‘What I mean is that it is beyond belief that any one device could have the power to achieve such a feat,’ said Kotov. ‘What empowers the Breath of the Gods? How can this one world, no matter how much energy it generates, provide even an infinitesimal fraction of the power that must surely be required to reshape the cosmos? I do not doubt your word, but the technological mastery needed to restore machinery abandoned millions of years ago by a lost alien race is staggering.’
Kotov lifted his gaze to the swirling, shimmering machine that filled the air above him, knowing that there was one question above all to which he needed an answer.
‘How did you do all this alone?’ he asked.
Telok heard his incredulity and responded just as bluntly.
‘The hidden instructions left by the Stellar Primogenitor’s builders were incredibly precise, archmagos. Marrying them to my peerless intellect, I unlocked a series of unambiguous structural and mathematical prescriptions that enabled me to replicate the conditions of physical reality found within the Noctis Labyrinthus and thus bring the device to life.’
Kotov’s face drained of what little colour it possessed. ‘Do not speak of that benighted place!’
Telok waved an admonishing finger, a bladed hook of entwined metal and parasitic crystal.
‘Do not warn me of anything in the same breath you ask me how the device functions, archmagos,’ warned Telok. ‘Even were current paradigms of Martian thinking capable of understanding any answers I might offer, you would not find them to your liking. They would upset your outmoded thinking and I know all too well how the Adeptus Mechanicus hates those who disrupt the stagnancy of their precious status quo.’
Kotov shook his head, wearying of Telok’s monstrous ego. He held Telok’s gaze, speaking clearly so that there could be no mistaking the clarity of his words.
‘I am an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and I own only the empirical clarity of the Omnissiah,’ said Kotov. ‘You, Archmagos Telok, are bound by the strictures of our order and the ideals of the Quest for Knowledge to divulge what you have learned.’
‘Oh, I shall,’ snapped Telok, the crystalline structure of his body flaring an aggressive crimson. ‘Have no fear of that, but as I have said, it will be at a time and place of my choosing.’
Telok took a crashing step towards Kotov, his heavy limbs ablaze with internal fire and his fists clenched into pounding hammers.
‘And that will be when I take the vessel with which you have so thoughtfully provided me back to Mars in triumph,’ said Telok. ‘It will be when I stand atop Olympus Mons as the new master of the Red Planet.’
The skitarii surrounding Kotov growled at Telok’s heretical pronouncements. Their weapon systems initiated, but Telok disengaged them with a blurt of high-level binary. They froze as their every internal augmentation seized up a heartbeat later.
‘And when I have remade the Mechanicus in my image,’ continued Telok, ‘I will use the Breath of the Gods to surge the heart of Terra’s sun to burn the rotting corpse of the Emperor and all his corrupt servants from its surface.’
The Black Templars’ speed and aggression were phenomenal.
No sooner had Telok spoken than they were on the offensive. No pause, no ramping up of fury. One minute the towering warriors were still, the next at full battle-pitch.
Telok raised a hand and each of the Space Marines froze in place, paralysed as thoroughly as the skitarii. Kotov read the frenetic tempo of the machine-spirits within their battleplate as they fought to overcome Telok’s paralysing code.
‘I will become the new Master of Mankind,’ laughed Telok. ‘A ruler devoted to the attainment of the Singularity of Consciousness.’
Kotov turned from Telok’s insanity as he heard the brittle sound of glass grinding on glass. Perhaps a hundred crystaliths were climbing onto the gantry from the inwardly curving slopes of the chamber, a similar number from below. They took up position all around the Cadians, extruded weapons ready to cut them down in a lethal crossfire.
‘What are you doing?’ said Kotov. ‘This is insane!’
‘Insane?’ said Telok derisively. ‘How could you possibly understand the mind of a god?’
‘Is that what you think you are?’ demanded Kotov.
‘I created this entire region of space,’ roared Telok, his voice afire with the passion of an Ecclesiarchy battle-preacher. ‘I have reignited the hearts of dead suns, crafted star systems from the waste matter of the universe and wrought life from death. If that does not give me th
e right to name myself a god, then what does?’
Quatria had always possessed a utilitarian aesthetic, but with her surroundings now crafted from memory, it had assumed an altogether bleaker aspect. The corridors were cold; though Linya knew, of course, that she wasn’t truly feeling cold. Her mind was conjuring that sensation based upon perceived sensory data.
As thorough and detailed a simulation as Galatea had rendered, the human mind was capable of seeing through almost any visual deception. The walls were just a little too crisply etched, the patterns not quite three-dimensional enough to entirely convince.
Linya walked with her arms wrapped around her body, as though hugging herself for comfort. Pointless, she knew. After all, what measure of physical comfort could be offered to a disembodied brain in a jar?
Yet some habits were too hard to break. It didn’t matter that her body was dead, her mind lived on. Enslaved by an abomination unto the Machine-God, yes, but enduring. Only by the slenderest margin had Linya held on to sanity at the sight of her skull hinged back and the bloody void within. Anyone not of the Mechanicus would likely have gone insane at such a vision, but the first lesson taught to neophytes of the Cult Mechanicus was that flesh was inferior to technology, that thought and memory and intellect were the true successors of flesh.
Indeed, wasn’t the final apotheosis striven for by the adepts of Mars, a freeing of pure intellect from the limitations of flesh and blood? Wasn’t that why so many of the Cult Mechanicus were so quick to shed their humanity and embrace mechanical augmentations in their ascent towards the ideal Singularity of Consciousness?
Linya had never subscribed to the notion of flesh’s abandonment, believing that to sacrifice all that made you human was to cut yourself off from the very thing that made life so wondrous.
Did her father know what had happened to her?
Grief swamped her every time she thought of him. She hoped he hadn’t been the one to find her. She hoped that someone had sanitised the scene of her physical death. She didn’t want to think what the sight of her lying on her medicae bed, cut open like a dissection subject, might do to his psyche.