Forges of mars, p.115
Forges Of Mars, page 115
The dataproctor’s head cocked to one side, as though listening to something only he could hear. He looked up and smiled.
‘Do you see that?’ he said, pointing to a pinprick of bright light crossing the sky, barely visible through the storm overhead. ‘That is cyclonic torpedo launched from an unregistered Deimos-pattern frigate in geostationary orbit with this exact spot. At its current velocity it will impact in ninety-seven seconds. You have that long to accept my employer’s offer of life.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what? Why should you choose life? A question better addressed to the technotheologians or, as I know how bitterly you despise them, Adept Hydraq, perhaps an Imperial preacher? Either way, time is running short for such deep questions of existence.’
‘Why do we get the choice to live?’ asked Hydraq.
‘Your existence or otherwise is of no interest to me, but you have been deemed useful and you have skills, which makes you desirable.’
Aurora felt the binaric shackles holding her fast unbind her body’s augmetics. Nemonix reversed her pistols and held them out to her, handles first.
Her optical threat readers said Nemonix was harmless, that she could kill him before he took his next breath.
Her gut told her she would be dead before she could move so much as a muscle.
‘We accept,’ she said, taking and holstering her guns.
‘What?’ said Hydraq. ‘No!’
‘We accept,’ she repeated. ‘I am life-bound to you, Hydraq. You cannot die, and if the only way to keep you alive is to treat with Alhazen, then we’re doing it.’
‘A most excellent decision,’ said the dataproctor, looking up at the descending warhead. ‘Now I would board that very fine speeder of yours and get as far from here as possible.’
‘You’re letting us go?’ asked Hydraq.
‘For now, but a time of change is upon Mars,’ said Nemonix, retreating into the storm’s fury. ‘And when it comes you will be called. It will go badly for you to refuse that call.’
And then he was gone.
Aurora lifted Hydraq and all but threw him into the rear cockpit of the Merganser. She vaulted into the pilot’s seat, sealed the canopy and shut down the electrostatic field. Howling winds slammed the speeder as its gull-wings unfolded and it sped away.
Barely had the inertia-couch gripped her when she rammed the engines out hard and the speeder surged from the crater.
Aurora flew hard and low, keeping as many ridges, rocks and mountains between them and the incoming ordnance as was humanly possible.
A second flash of detonation lit up the Martian desert.
A radiant dome of white-hot vapour fire turned the interior of the Bouguer Crater and everything in it to molten glass.
‘What did we just agree to?’ asked Hydraq, his voice all but smothered by the force of acceleration.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What did you mean about Telok?’
‘They think he’s coming back,’ said Hydraq.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graham McNeill has written many titles for The Horus Heresy, including the Siege of Terra novellas Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus, the novels The Crimson King and Vengeful Spirit, and the New York Times bestselling A Thousand Sons and The Reflection Crack’d, the latter of which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now seven novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written the Forges of Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Warhammer Horror novella The Colonel’s Monograph. For Warhammer, he has written the Warhammer Chronicles trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.
An extract from Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work.
Circa 10,000 years ago
Ezekiel Sedayne was dying.
There was a time when he stood tall among men, as much a physical as an intellectual giant, but those days were done. He was old. He was at the end. His seven-foot frame had shrunken in. His spine curled with calcium loss. His hands were knotted with arthritis. His skin was slack, flowing around brittle bones like draped cloth. His lustrous black hair had turned as fine and white as the silk of a spider’s nest. It spread around his head on the pillow as if it, like his skin, had been laid there, and if he stood, if he had been capable of standing, he would have left it behind as a cloud of down.
Sedayne’s life had lasted longer than any child of Terra had a right to expect, but all things are finite, and his existence was coming to a close.
Human beings are aware of their mortality, yet they deny it to the very last. Sedayne regarded his intelligence to be in excess of most others. He believed he was free of the delusions that ruled the mind to reason’s detriment, yet now he succumbed. He could scarcely believe death was knocking at his door.
This cannot be happening to me, he thought. But it was.
Sedayne had come from nothing to become one of the greatest scientists of his age. Despite his failing body his mind was sharp. His insight clear. In numb amazement, he insisted he felt young in his soul. The ravages of age on his body gave the lie to that.
He appeared in many respects like a corpse. Lips drew back from yellow teeth made long by the recession of dark gums. No matter how fast his thoughts raced, his body barely moved. His chest trembled with the bird flutter of his heart. Every inhalation was a bellow’s wheeze.
But he was not dead yet. The breaths kept coming, and when the door to his bedchamber creaked wide his eyelids flickered open and his eyes, which were strikingly moist in the dry valleys of his parchment skin, swivelled to fix themselves upon his visitor.
‘The Altrix Herminia,’ he wheezed. His top lip stuck to his teeth for want of saliva, spoiling his smile. He was drying up from the inside out, like a spice pod left out to desiccate in the sun. Soon every drop of life would be wrung out of him, and there would only be an arid husk left. Then there would not even be that.
The Altrix came forwards with a rustle of layered, soft, plastek clothing. Upon her breast pocket she wore a caduceus in red and white that contrasted with the pale green of her dress. The uniform was formal and tightly laced, a symbol binding her to her duty, but though her garments were restrictive she moved with easy grace that suggested athletic, if not dangerous, power.
‘My lord director,’ she said, dipping her head respectfully. The sharp curve of her fringe swung neatly over her eyes.
‘Your arrival pleases me.’ Sedayne’s head moved feebly to the side so he could follow her approach. The appetites of a younger man tormented him. ‘Age does not agree with me,’ he said. He was tiring, his breath rasping harder. He was a machine close to shutdown. He looked to the Altrix’s face, then at the fat syringe she carried in her hand.
‘The time… is close…’ Each word was an individual effort. Each syllable required him to assign it a painful breath. Such care and attention his words received now, when once they were spent so carelessly.
‘It is, my lord,’ said the Altrix. ‘You are dying.’
Sedayne gave a death’s-head grin. ‘I can always trust you to dress things up prettily for me,’ he said. ‘How goes the search?’
‘I have identified seven possible candidates, all acolytes of Diacomes. Recovery missions are outbound.’
‘Then administer the last of the elixir. I want to walk and move again. I have been confined here too long.’
‘You are sure?’
He nodded his head painfully. ‘You brought it. You knew what I would say.’
‘This is the last,’ she said. Marbled, opaque, silvery liquid that moved to currents of its own filled the glass cylinder. ‘The Adarnians are gone. The last rendered down. Their world is empty. Once I inject this dose, there will be no more. I am sorry.’
The Adarnian race was decreed harmless during the Great Crusade, and allowed to live under an Imperial protectorate. It had not prevented them being harvested to extinction. Unluckily for them, their body chemistry had miraculous effects on the human organism.
‘A shame… I… never…’ he swallowed twice, trying to summon enough spit to lubricate his creaking larynx. ‘Learned how to synthesise it,’ he said in a breathless rush.
‘Are you certain that now is the time, my lord? We could delay a few days. There is sufficient here to return you to health for a few months, no more. It may be better to wait until a candidate has been selected and returned to Terra.’
He closed his eyes. ‘No. Do it now.’
He was too weak to hold out his arm, so Herminia pulled it gently from under the covers, fetched a stirrup rest and strapped the limb in place. The veins in the crook of his elbow were ruined by repeated injection, and it took an amount of coaxing to find a suitable place for the needle. The drug had to be administered directly into the bloodstream in large amounts; pneumatic injection or skin absorption would not do.
Adarnian elixir was the last resort of dying men when all other rejuvenats failed. It came with many prices, not least the atrocity of its making. The elixir was illegal, its use punishable by death. Sedayne didn’t care about the xenos or the law, but there were other, more immediate costs. Firstly, when the elixir’s positive effects were exhausted, the user returned to a worse state than before. Every dose brought the certainty of hurried deterioration. This last dose would kill him.
Secondly, there was pain.
‘Are you ready?’ she said.
He blinked his assent. She set the needle to his arm. She had no need to tell him it would hurt.
The bee sting of the needle piercing his flesh made him gasp. The real pain came with the plunger’s depression. Health-giving poison pressed from the organs of sentient beings flooded his system, and with it came a fire that scoured age back with its heat, reforging frayed genes and kick-starting the machineries of life.
Stolen youth ran riot through his body.
Ezekiel Sedayne screamed.
Now
Glittering debris surrounded the corpse of the planet. Grey as old bone, drier than dust, a shroud of shining particulates gathered solemnly around the corpse as it proceeded about the sun. The track the world ran was the most amenable to life, and yet life was absent entirely.
The broken remains of a single void station hung at equatorial high anchor, its decaying orbit recently stabilised. The soft shine of atmospheric shields closing the breaches in one section was just visible against the sun’s glare. Three ships occupied the orbital’s near space. Between the station and the world was a light cruiser bearing rich heraldry of yellow and black. Crossed scythes of gold on a sable background adorned its stern shield plates. In the glare of the sun the scars all over its hull were starkly visible. The scrollwork upon its hammerhead prow bore the name Sterope, one of the ten legendary steeds of Sotha.
Closest to the orbital was a small vessel of the Mechanicus tech-priests. Much of it was bare metal, the rest painted in the rich reds of Mars. It had no name displayed, but several identification plates bore the same number string – 0-101-0. Small in size, it was nevertheless packed with manufacturing facilities and dock points, and a constant stream of drone craft passed between the ship and the station.
The vessel furthest out was a larger Space Marine strike cruiser of new design, fresh from the shipyard, and free of damage or alterations to its original plan. Its deep blue livery was unmarred, the horned ultima displayed in many places remaining crisply white. It was a young yet fierce ship, and was named the Lord of Vespator, for it bore the ruler of that world as he travelled throughout his kingdom.
A hangar door opened in the side of the Lord of Vespator. A single gunship emerged. Exhaust stabbing from the engines made a blade of blue plasma fire and the ship’s hull shone as bright as a jewelled hilt, so that it resembled a sword thrown handle-first to a beleaguered warrior battling a monster.
But the weapon came too late. The monster had triumphed. The world was dead.
So did Decimus Felix, Tetrarch of Ultramar, come to survey the ruin of his domain.
‘A tight fit,’ said Daelus. The Techmarine altered the ship’s path with minute adjustments to the flightsticks. Felix looked out through the armourglass blister. The cockpit was set high back above the transport bays, and the ceiling passed within inches of his face, close enough that he could examine the damage to the metal, and name the bioweapons responsible.
Only Daelus’ skill saw the Overlord squeeze into the hangar. His left hand moved swiftly over the ship’s array of buttons. Jets fringed the blocky double hull with bursts of light and vapour in response.
‘This is not ideal,’ said Felix.
‘I’ve landed in tighter spaces, my lord,’ said Daelus, tense with concentration. ‘Not many, I’ll admit.’
Daelus’ crew consisted of a further Primaris Marine in the red of the forge and three Chapter serfs. They were far too preoccupied with landing to speak to the tetrarch, but peered at their instruments nervously. Troncus, the Techmarine co-pilot, was immobile. Only the tiny movements of his hands as he corrected Daelus’ few errors showed that a living being occupied his armour.
Proximity alarms trilled from several quarters. The prow lights hit a solid wall.
‘Emperor’s will, this is getting worse!’ Daelus said.
The landing bay had suffered catastrophic damage. Efforts to patch it up had shrunk its space by half. A wall of plasteel plating fixed in place with metallite foams divided the bay. Bracing girders holding the wall upright angled into the hangar, making Daelus’ task all the more difficult.
‘Nearly got it,’ the pilot said, more to himself than to anyone else.
Felix watched ruptured metal pass by. The Aegida had possessed many landing decks. The monsters of Hive Fleet Kraken had wrecked them all as they boarded. Only this smaller docking portal had been returned to operational use.
The Overlord’s power core whined up and down as Troncus adjusted the energy flow in preparation for landing. The ship swayed. Troncus looked at the pilot.
‘That’s not my fault,’ Daelus said to his unspoken rebuke. ‘Grav-plating’s no good in here,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing’s good in here. Troncus, run landing sequence. This is the best position we’re going to get.’
Felix’s ear beads clicked. Daelus had opened an unencrypted vox channel.
‘Sergeant Cominus,’ Daelus said. ‘I’m setting down.’
‘Ready. Open the forward hatches,’ Cominus voxed back.
‘Depressurising holds. There’s no atmosphere. I’m sure you’ve got your helmets on.’
‘I need not remind you I find your levity irritating, Daelus.’
‘He’s no fun, that one,’ said Daelus, making sure Cominus heard before he shut the channel.
‘He serves well,’ said Felix.
‘He could smile while he was doing it,’ said Daelus. ‘Life does not all have to be drill and duty, not even for us.’
The atmospheric retention field was out, leaving the hangar open to space. Daelus joggled the flight sticks against the outrush of air expelled from the twin passenger compartments. The ramps opened as the vessel’s engines gave out one last burst. The starboard wing squealed noisily down the partition wall, causing Felix to grit his teeth.
‘I said it was tight,’ Daelus muttered.
Before the Overlord settled onto its landing claws, eight Space Marines ran out, bolt rifles at the ready, and took up guard at various points of the hangar. Each wore Mark X Intercessor pattern power armour in differing heraldries, but all were united by their richly decorated left pauldrons, where the sigil of the Tetrarch of Vespator was displayed on golden plating. Cominus was more obvious for his manner than the bright red and white wargear he wore or his sergeant’s insignia. He stood in front of the Overlord’s nose, directing Felix’s bodyguard with a flurry of battle-sign, his bolt rifle held upright.
The engines wheezed. The ship sank down on its hydraulics and ceased moving.
‘That’s it, we’re in,’ Daelus said. Troncus clicked a dozen buttons. The serfs visibly relaxed and began post-flight checks. The power plant quieted to a hum. Daelus’ armour sighed as it disconnected from the umbilicus set into the back of the seat. The armour was heavy on him without power, but he turned round naturally enough, and angled his helm to look up at Felix.
‘Welcome to the Aegida Orbital, my lord. Welcome to Sotha.’
They left the hangar, Cominus first. The sergeant insisted on taking point himself, as he did every time the tetrarch ventured out from the Regia Tetrarchia on Vespator. Felix followed his men, the blue of his Ultramarines armour dark in the badly lit station.
Felix disliked pomp but he accepted the bodyguard. Another warrior of his skill might be annoyed by the constant watch, and the implication he could not take care of himself. Felix was pragmatic enough to know that being annoyed by his attendants would do nothing to change the fact of their presence, so he did not allow himself to feel anything much about it, and thanked them often for their service. Likewise, Cominus’ terse, officious manner failed to irritate him. Felix did his best to follow Lord Guilliman’s example in all things, and see a thing for its potential utility, not for how it made him feel.
When he did examine those feelings, he resented the constant cosseting his position forced on him. These moments of weakness only strengthened his resolve to behave as Lord Guilliman would wish. The bodyguards and all his many attendants back on Vespator had purpose and they must therefore be allowed to fulfil it and not be hampered nor criticised merely for being. Theoretical, practical – the Ultramarian way served him well.
But emotions are disobedient creatures, and he found himself glad that he had only his bodyguard with him. He welcomed the break from his staff. Since being appointed as tetrarch, one of the four lords of Greater Ultramar, by Roboute Guilliman, Felix had done his best to visit every sector. This was his first trip this far into the old Sotharan League. His lord castellan on Vespator had pointedly remarked that Felix took his tours to avoid politics. There was perhaps truth in that.
