Vitali Tychon was often dismissed as a harmless eccentric, but Linya knew him to have a determined, ruthless core. She hoped he hadn’t done something foolish upon learning of her death. Galatea would kill him without a second thought, and as fiercely intelligent as Vitali was, she knew Galatea would never risk assimilating him into its neuromatrix.
Linya had no idea how much time had passed since Galatea had first shown her the truth of her condition, that portion of her cranial implantation removed along with any conventional means of linking to the outside world. Her high-level implants appeared to be functional, but without advanced diagnostics it was impossible to be sure what the machine intelligence had left her.
Linya looked up as she heard a circular door iris open beside her. The confero. Every Mechanicus facility had one, a sanctified chamber where matters of techno-theology could be discussed and debated at length under the benevolent gaze of the Omnissiah.
Linya ignored the door and kept walking.
She had already explored every portion of the Quatrian Galleries as they were known to her. The parts she knew best were lifelike down to the smallest detail, but those areas she was less familiar with had an unfinished quality, like a Theatrica Imperialis set designed only to be viewed from a distance. The farthest portions of the orbital, which she had known only from schematics, were little more than bare, wire-frame walls and lifeless renderings of the most basic structural elements.
It was towards this region of Quatria Linya walked, finding Galatea’s false representation of a place she had once called home repugnant. Better to surround herself with obviously fake surroundings, to keep the truth of her imprisonment uppermost.
The corridor curved around to the left, but where she had expected to find the lateral transit that led to the central hub, she instead found herself in the communal deck levels. Along the wall, the irising door to the confero opened up once more.
‘I won’t be your puppet,’ said Linya.
She ignored the door and kept walking, taking paths at random and moving further into the orbital, trying to lose herself in its deeper structure.
But no matter which path she took, which direction she chose to confound her captor, every route took her back to the communal decks and the opened door of the confero. She sighed, knowing that in a constructed reality where Galatea controlled every aspect of the virtual architecture, she would always be brought back here.
‘Fine,’ she said, stepping through into the confero.
The space was larger than she remembered, but that shouldn’t have surprised her. A domed chamber of copper and bronze, with a circular table not unlike the Ultor Martius aboard the Speranza at its heart. A three-dimensional hologram of the Icon Mechanicus hung suspended over the table, and seated around it were eleven magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
All were robed in black or red, their vestments crisp and fresh-looking as their wearers remembered them in life. As varied an assembly of tech-priests as any she had seen, all had an air of great antiquity to them. If what she remembered of Galatea was to be trusted, then these were the magi it had ensnared in its web over the last three thousand years.
said Linya, knowing better than to immediately trust anything Galatea showed her.
She saw their immediate consternation, looking at her through a variety of cumbersome-looking optic stalks and glittering augmented crystals as though she was speaking in some dead language. Linya saw they looked to a female tech-priest in the chequered-edged robes of a Mechanicus Envoy. Alone of the gathered tech-priests, her head was bare, and Linya was struck by the resemblance she saw to herself.
Noospheric tags identified her as Magos Syriestte, and Linya remembered the name from the transcript of Archmagos Kotov’s first interrogation of Galatea. Typically of envoys of the Mechanicus, the woman’s features were largely organic, the better to liaise with those who preferred to deal with an approximation of a human face.
Childishly simple binary streamed between the assembled priests and Magos Syriestte in an interleaved babble. Syriestte held up a hand to silence them and rose smoothly from the table. The Envoy’s lower limbs had been amputated and replaced with a repulsor pod and a series of multi-jointed manipulator arms. She floated over the table, her clicking, articulated lower limbs moving as though swimming her through the air.
said Linya.
Syriestte cocked her head to one side and her answer was formed in binaric cant that was absurdly simple, devoid of any hexamathic complexity or subtlety.
Linya repeated herself, but it was clear that neither Syriestte or any of the other tech-priests had understood her. Then it hit Linya why Galatea had first spoken to her in archaic cant and why her binary was as impenetrable to these adepts as xeno-dialect.
She rerouted her binarics through the simplest converter she still possessed and tried again.
said Syriestte with a smile.
replied Syriestte.
Linya shook her head. ‘
Syriestte smiled.
Linya took hold of Syriestte’s arm as she rotated to face the table once more. Her grip was firm and unyielding, preventing Syriestte from moving.
said Linya.
One of Syriestte’s manipulator arms gently removed Linya’s hand.
she said, with just the right level of empathy,
said Linya.
said Syriestte.
cried Linya.
said Syriestte, sweeping a warning gaze around the table as the other magi leaned forwards at Linya’s impassioned words.
Syriestte directed her next words at them as much as Linya.
said Linya. t pay for what it’s done to me. What it’s done to all of us.>
Syriestte shook her head and drifted back to her place at the table.
she said.
said Linya, switching to higher forms of hexamathic binary as the beginnings of an idea formed.
Linya didn’t doubt that Galatea logged everything said within its neuromatrix, but her furious words provoked no response from the machine intelligence.
But she had neither expected nor desired one.
‘Weapons hot,’ said Ven Anders. ‘Halo formation on me.’
Despite the multitude of crystalline weaponry aimed at them, the Cadians lifted their lasrifles to their shoulders and fell into a defensive formation around their colonel.
Kotov stepped forwards with his hands raised, as though this unfolding drama could be resolved with diplomacy.
‘Archmagos Telok,’ said Kotov. ‘Please, let us all take a breath and think this through. We have travelled halfway across the galaxy to find you and your technology. With all you have achieved, you will return to Mars in triumph. You will be feted as a hero, an exemplar of all the Mechanicus strives to be. All you desire will be yours – renown, riches, resources… Just let us bring you back and we can forget that such incendiary words were ever spoken in the heat of the moment.’
‘You are wasting your time, Archmagos Kotov,’ said Surcouf. ‘Telok means to kill us all and take the Speranza. That has been his intention since the moment we landed. The only reason we’re alive right now is that Telok’s colossal ego wouldn’t let him just take the ship without us knowing why.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Kotov, shaking his head and waving away the rogue trader’s words with a golden arm of his cybernetic suit. ‘You have this all wrong, Surcouf,’ said Kotov. ‘All wrong.’
Telok took a step towards Kotov.
‘No, I am afraid Master Surcouf is right,’ said Telok. ‘But rather than thinking of my actions as egotistical, consider my allowing you to live this long a last gift. To see the Breath of the Gods in all its glory before you all die is an honour few others will receive.’
‘Kotov, step away from the traitor,’ said Anders.
‘We are all servants of the Omnissiah and the Emperor,’ pleaded Kotov, a man alone with his last hope of redemption turned to ash in the face of Telok’s betrayal.
‘Kotov!’ repeated Anders. ‘You really need to listen to me.’
‘You name yourself a god,’ said Surcouf. ‘But there’s only one being in the Imperium worthy of that title. And you’re not the Emperor.’
‘Not yet,’ said Telok.
Bielanna fought to hold on to her perception of the present in the face of the spinning maelstrom of glittering silver metal below her. The distortion in the skein had its origin with this Caoineag. She blinked away tears, feeling the temporal deformations it created just by existing.
‘What madman would create such monstrous technology?’
‘The mon-keigh,’ said Ariganna, perched atop the ironwork railings of the gantry overlooking the bickering ape-creatures below. ‘Who else?’
Bielanna shook her head. Sensory aftershocks exploded in her mind. A rock in a pool of potential futures. She saw the humans killing one another, the eldar dropping into their midst and slaughtering them all. She saw Lexell Kotov die a thousand times, a thousand different ways.
Torn apart by the crystalline beasts scurrying across the surface of this vast space like loathsome caricatures of warp spiders. Killed by a blast of green light from a glassy energy beam. Hurled to his death from the gantry.
Futures branched and split a thousand times and then a thousand more, but in each one where the mon-keigh died in this chamber one certainty emerged. Inviolable and unchanging in its outcome.
She saw the eldar die and this world torn asunder.
As fixed a moment in the skein as anything in the past, this world’s doom would set in motion a cascade of death and destruction on a galactic scale. The murder the Lost Magos would unleash with his horrific technology would dwarf the death toll of even the greatest wars of ancient days.
Ariganna shook her head and gave a snort of soft laughter.
‘It seems the mon-keigh are doing our killing for us,’ she said, sheathing her blade. ‘The bloodshed has already begun.’
Bielanna pulled herself towards the gantry, lurching as the collisions of past and future came in waves. Ariganna looked back at her and Bielanna saw the trifold transformations weave through the exarch in rapid succession. The potential of Ariganna’s death loomed closer than ever.
The path of all their deaths hovered within a hair’s breadth of becoming inescapable.
Life and death. Spinning. Hanging on a slender, fraying thread.
‘No,’ said Bielanna, seeing the fighting below and following the one path she had never expected to tread. ‘I see it now… Kotov’s death is not the answer… it never was.’
A glassy blade slashed over Roboute’s head. He ducked and put a high-powered las-round through the crystalith’s head. The intense heat of the shot bloomed within its skull, vaporising the microscopic machines animating the creature. It halted, frozen like an ice sculpture straddling the railings of the gantry.
Another rose up next to it, blasts of green energy flashing from its tine-bladed fists. A flurry of whickering Cadian las-bolts blasted it from the railing in pieces. Roboute scrambled away as more zipping green darts of killing light slashed overhead. A portion of the gantry vanished in a flare of hissing fire as a bolt impacted next to him.
‘Ilanna!’ called Roboute, seeing a crystalith drop to the gantry behind the Renard’s tech-priest. Unlike him, she wasn’t armed. The crystalith extruded a pair of glittering hook-blades, limned with green fire. Ilanna screamed and extended her mechadendrites towards the creature, unleashing a torrent of dissonant binary that made Roboute flinch with sudden, gut-wrenching nausea.
The crystalith’s torso exploded in a fan of broken glass.
Roboute low-crawled over to Pavelka, still queasy at the after-effects of her binaric attack.
‘How in the Emperor’s name did you do that?’
A tech-priest’s expression was never easy to read, but Roboute knew Pavelka well enough to see a mixture of shame and horror.
‘Some old and very bad code I should have deleted a long time ago,’ said Pavelka. ‘But you know what they say, the Mechanicus–’
Before she could finish, Kotov’s savants and menials were gunned down before they even knew what was happening. Kotov’s servo-skulls flitted away overhead in panic as he took refuge behind his frozen skitarii.
A shot grazed Ilanna’s shoulder. Metal, not flesh, thankfully.
‘This gantry is a terrible place to defend!’ yelled Ilanna.
‘You have anywhere better?’ answered Roboute.
Crystaliths surrounded them, front and rear, above and below, and Roboute suspected there was only one reason they weren’t already dead. He picked himself up and ran hunched over to where Ven Anders’s Cadians were pushing down the gantry towards an entrance farther along the wall. They were leaving bodies in their wake, each yard won with the life of a Cadian Guardsman.
Roboute now saw why Telok had kept them moving away from the entrance to the chamber: to better isolate them from any means of escape.
The Black Templars and skitarii remained unmoving. The power armour of the Space Marines was blistering and splitting under repeated impacts. It would only be a matter of time until the warriors within were killed.
‘Surcouf,’ shouted Anders, loosing a pair of shots into a crystalith descending from an upper level. It fell from the wall, falling into the ochre mist below with the sound of breaking glass. ‘You’re alive.’
‘We have to get close to Telok!’ shouted Roboute, snapping off another two shots towards the gantry. Anders gave him a look of
disbelief.
‘What?’ he said, snapping a powercell into the grip of his pistol. ‘Are you insane?’
‘The only reason these crystal things didn’t gun us down straight away was because Telok was too close to us,’ said Roboute, ducking as sizzling bolts of green fire flashed past his head. ‘We have to get closer.’
Telok’s face was sheathed in a rippling layer of translucent crystal, yet even through that distorting mask, Roboute saw the god-complex that thousands of years of isolation and autonomy had birthed.
In the midst of the violence, Kotov stepped from behind his ranked skitarii and held his arms up in frantic supplication.
‘End this madness, Telok!’ cried Kotov in desperation.
In response, Telok’s crystal-sheathed Dreadnought limbs reached down and tore Kotov’s golden arms from his mechanised body.
Archmagos Kotov reeled in horror, once again taking refuge within his skitarii. Acrid floodstream gushed from his ruined shoulders. The pungent reek of burned oils hazed the air with their potency. Telok crashed towards him, bludgeoning one of the paralysed skitarii to ruin against the wall. Telok’s distorted laughter brayed through his crystalline helm as he hurled another over the gantry and scorched a third to ash.
Roboute ran forwards as Telok’s energy claw reached down to tear Archmagos Kotov’s head from his golden body.
A deafening howl echoed through the enormous cavern.
It was a nerve-shredding scream of furious, ancient hunger that sent shrieking surges of agony along every nerve in Roboute’s body. The pain was incredible, like a searing, life-ending seizure.
He dropped to his knees, hands clamped over his ears.
Nor were the effects of the deathly howl confined to creatures of flesh and blood. The crystaliths glitched and spasmed as their arcane connection to their master was disrupted.
Even as Roboute felt a measure of control returning to his limbs, a giant of palest ivory and emerald slammed down on the gantry in front of him.