Forges of mars, p.83
Forges Of Mars, page 83
‘Just letting the masses see what good friends you and I are,’ said Hawke. ‘Doesn’t do my reputation as a man with friends in high places any harm.’
‘I almost got one of them killed.’
‘You mean Rasselas X-42 almost got one of them killed,’ said Coyne, ever ready with a correction where none was needed.
Rasselas X-42 was an arco-flagellant that had bonded with Abrehem during the eldar’s aborted boarding action. The cyborg killer had become Abrehem’s unlooked-for protector, and came close to killing the Wulfse’s crewman when he’d threatened his charge.
Abrehem could still see the blood pouring from the man as the arco-flagellant skewered his shoulder with one blade-flail and held the sharpened tips of the other millimetres from his eye.
‘Can’t say the bastard didn’t deserve it,’ said Hawke. ‘Man can’t run a rig worth a damn.’
‘And you’ve been working rigs for, what, a few weeks?’ said Abrehem. ‘Suddenly you’re an expert?’
‘Better than him,’ grumbled Hawke. ‘Anyway, where is the big lad? He was handy to have around, what with Crusha getting his head cut off.’
‘He’s gone,’ said Abrehem.
‘Yeah, but where?’
‘Do you really think I’m going to tell you?’ said Abrehem.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d only try and get him out and use him like you used Crusha,’ said Abrehem.
‘And that’s a bad thing, why?’ said Hawke. ‘After all, never hurts to have someone who can rip a man’s arms off watching your back. You don’t need him now, so why stop someone else having a turn with the good stuff?’
‘Good stuff? X-42 was a mass murderer,’ said Abrehem. ‘He slaughtered millions of people before they turned him into an arco-flagellant. I’ve seen through his eyes, Hawke, and trust me, that’s not someone you want “watching your back”.’
Hawke shrugged. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘If you think he’s too dangerous, then that’s good enough for me.’
‘Really?’
‘What, you think I’m going to try and find a deranged killer on my own and use him to further my own ends?’
Abrehem and Coyne both nodded.
Hawke grinned and threw up his hands. ‘Oh, Thor’s ghost, save me from these untrustworthy, suspicious souls!’
Abrehem and Coyne both laughed, but before they could say any more, Totha Mu-32 appeared from behind Wulfse’s baseplate and strode purposefully towards them.
‘Here comes your new best friend,’ sneered Hawke, all traces of the easy familiarity they’d just shared snuffed out in a heartbeat. ‘Off to take you to spark school.’
‘Shut up, Hawke.’
‘So you’re going to be one of them now, is that it?’ said Hawke, nodding in the direction of Magos Turentek’s bulky ceiling-rig as it clattered over the vault of the prow forge. ‘When me and Coyne here next see you are we going to have to bow and scrape to you? Yes, magos, no, magos… by your leave, magos.’
The venom in Hawke’s voice was bitter, but not unexpected.
‘Of course not,’ said Abrehem. ‘But after all we achieved when we took the servitors offline, showing the Mechanicus that they can’t treat us like animals, I think I can make a real difference if I become a magos. More than I can as a bondsman, that’s for sure.’
‘Oh, so you’re an idealist,’ laughed Hawke. ‘You’re going to change the Adeptus Mechanicus from within all on your own?’
‘One man can start a landslide with the casting of a single pebble,’ said Abrehem.
‘What’s that?’
‘A quote,’ said Abrehem. ‘I think Sebastian Thor said it. Or some cardinal, I don’t remember. But the point is that maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can make things better. At least I have to try.’
‘You’re no Sebastian Thor,’ said Hawke.
‘You’re a piece of work, Hawke, you know that?’ said Coyne.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Hawke, and his betrayed expression at Coyne’s support for Abrehem was laughable.
‘Can’t you be happy for Abe?’ said Coyne.
‘Happy?’ said Hawke. ‘Didn’t you hear me? He’s going to be one of them now! Give it a year and he’ll be the one working you to death. He’ll forget all about you and leave us down here in the shit, while he lords it over us like some inbred hive-king!’
‘I’ve known men like you before, Hawke,’ said Abrehem. ‘You’ve got skills and you could actually do something with your life, but you’re so consumed by jealousy that you’d rather tear down anyone else who achieves something than try to better yourself.’
‘You haven’t achieved anything, Abrehem Locke,’ snapped Hawke. ‘You inherited those eyes from your old man and if it wasn’t for me getting hold of that faulty pistol you wouldn’t have that arm. Handed to you on a silver platter, they were. You didn’t earn being Machine-touched, it just came easy to you. What chance did the rest of us have with you around?’
Abrehem was incredulous.
‘You’re seriously saying I should thank you for getting my arm burned off?’
Hawke shrugged, but didn’t answer as Totha Mu-32 finally reached Virtanen’s baseplate and looked up at them.
‘Come, Abrehem, it is time to return to Adept Manubia’s forge,’ he said. ‘We have a great deal to do, and no time to waste in idle banter.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hawke. ‘Off you trot, Magos Locke. Don’t want to be wasting time with the scum, eh?’
As councils of war went, Tanna had seldom seen stranger.
They gathered around a hexagonal control hub from which they had removed four servitors that appeared to have expired at their stations. Dust lay thick and undisturbed across their corpses and the control hub’s numerous blank cathode ray panels.
He and Varda stood to one side of the hub, with Issur, Bracha and Yael a step behind. Roboute Surcouf and Ven Anders sat on its integral bench seats, taking the opportunity to rest. The Cadian had taken a burn to the arm from a crystalith weapon, but bore his wound without complaint. Magos Pavelka worked at an open panel on the hub, and Archmagos Kotov knelt at its base, rewiring the guts of its machinery with a trio of chain-like mechadendrites that unfurled from his back. Tied-off cables and spot-welded seams closed off his ruined shoulders where the skitarii had worked on his augmetic frame.
Opposite the Imperials stood the eldar witch, who Surcouf told him was called Bielanna. Next to her was a warrior named Ariganna Icefang.
Tanna had only seen her fight for a few fractions of a second, but that had been enough to convince him that when the time came to kill her – as it surely must – she would be a formidable foe.
The giant warrior-construct was also part of the council.
‘Is it not a robot?’ Varda asked Bielanna after the farseer identified it as Uldanaish Ghostwalker.
‘No,’ it said. ‘I am not a robot and I can speak for myself.’
‘Then is that a suit of armour?’ asked Tanna. ‘Is there a warrior within, like a Knight?’
‘I do not wear this armour,’ said Ghostwalker. ‘I am part of it, and it is part of me.’
‘Like a Dreadnought,’ said Tanna.
‘I am not like your Dreadnoughts,’ said Ghostwalker, leaning in with his oval skull gleaming with reflected lightning.
‘You’re not?’
‘No, I died many centuries ago.’
Varda made the sign of the aquila, but said no more, shooting Tanna a glare of disapproval. Before Tanna could denounce vile alien necromancy, the control hub sparked with life and a bass hum built from each of its six panels. Two immediately blew out in a shower of sparks and flame. Magos Pavelka extinguished them with gaseous spray from her mechadendrites.
The hub gradually returned to functionality, ancient circuits coaxed to life by Pavelka’s ministrations and Kotov’s binary incantations. Gem-like indicator buttons flickered and the screens crackled with what, to Tanna, looked like meaningless static.
Kotov stood, and despite the hub’s reactivation, Tanna saw deep-rooted despair in his face. A weariness he knew all too well.
‘There,’ said Kotov. ‘At least we might gain a better idea of where we are. Magos Pavelka, what manner of network is in place?’
‘Hard to tell, archmagos,’ said Pavelka, fighting the hub’s decrepitude as much as its truculent machine-spirit. ‘I’m used to more cooperative systems. This one’s been dead for centuries and keeps trying to break my connection. I’ve fixed our position as best I can, but it’s taking time to re-establish communion protocols with those hubs that are still functional.’
‘I do not want excuses, adept, I want solutions.’
‘Working on it, archmagos,’ said Pavelka. ‘I’m trying to access a hostile planetary network without sending up a flare that I am the one doing it and thereby announcing our presence.’
‘Work faster,’ said Kotov, and his mechadendrites retracted into the cavity from which they’d emerged. ‘Time is not on our side.’
Pavelka nodded and kept working, fingers and mechadendrites dancing over the indicator buttons and brass dials.
‘Can you use this machine to establish a link with your ship?’ asked Bielanna.
‘No,’ said Pavelka. ‘Every large-scale comms I’ve seen so far is locked down. Telok knows our personal vox can’t cut through the atmospheric distortion, so he’ll assume our first move will be to locate one powerful enough to contact the Speranza.’
‘You are a witch, yes?’ said Tanna, leaning forwards to address Bielanna.
She nodded, but it was Ariganna Icefang who answered. ‘Bielanna Faerelle is a farseer, Templar. Use that word again and you will be drowning in your own blood before it leaves your lips.’
Tanna felt Varda’s anger at the exarch’s threat, and swallowed his own. For now. Until his armour had completed its purge of Telok’s lockdown code, a duel between them was not something he wished to provoke.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Then, farseer, can you open another of those… gateways? Can you get us back to your ship?’
‘Or, better yet, the Speranza?’ suggested Ven Anders.
‘Our ship is no more,’ said Bielanna. ‘Your vessel’s chrono-weapon crippled it within the Halo Scar. The Starblade was torn apart by its gravimetric tempests.’
‘Then how did you get here?’ asked Anders.
‘We escaped to your vessel before ours was destroyed.’
‘How?’ demanded Kotov. ‘The Speranza is shielded against such things.’
‘A webway portal,’ guessed Surcouf. ‘Like the one that saved us from Telok.’
Bielanna gave the rogue trader a sidelong look.
Surcouf shrugged and said, ‘You’re not the first eldar I’ve met. Remember?’
Tanna remembered Surcouf’s tale of being rescued from a wrecked Navy warship by an eldar vessel. Of how he had lived among the eldar of Alaitoc before being returned to Imperial space.
‘You know a great deal of the eldar ways,’ said Tanna.
‘Some,’ said Surcouf, quick to spot the implicit threat. ‘Look, the eldar want to stop Telok leaving Exnihlio with the Breath of the Gods just as much as we do. So the sooner we figure out the best way to do that, the better chance we have of staying alive.’
Tanna nodded, accepting the rogue trader’s word for now, and turned from Surcouf to address the eldar. ‘I reiterate my question,’ he said. ‘Can you open another gateway? To the Speranza if your ship is no more.’
Bielanna shook her head and Tanna saw the exhaustion that went deep into her soul. ‘No,’ she said. ‘To open a portal into the webway takes great power and concentration. Just getting my warriors onto this planet almost drained me completely. And opening the gate that allowed us to escape Telok… That cost me more than you can possibly know. In time, I will regain strength enough to open another portal, but not now.’
‘Then do you have strength enough to send a message to one of your kind aboard the Speranza?’ said Kotov.
‘There are none of my kind left aboard your ship,’ snapped Bielanna. ‘We are all that remains.’
‘Then send a message to one of the Cadian battle-psykers or one of my ship’s astropaths,’ snapped Kotov.
‘Even if I could communicate with such primitive minds, what makes you think they would believe me?’
‘She’s right, archmagos,’ said Anders. ‘Any psyker of the Seventy-First who reported hearing alien voices would be executed on the spot. Living on the edge of the Eye, you don’t take chances with things like that.’
‘There must be some way of reaching the Speranza,’ said Kotov, fixing everyone gathered at the hub with his unflinching gaze. ‘I have to warn Tarkis Blaylock of what Telok plans!’
Pavelka gestured to the static on the screens. ‘Even if we manage to find an active system, the interference around Exnihlio renders vox useless.’
‘Then we clear the atmosphere,’ said Tanna, picturing the toxic skies en route to the surface of Exnihlio. ‘We clear it long enough to get a message through.’
‘Clear the atmosphere?’ said Anders. ‘How?’
‘Those towers we saw coming in on the Barisan,’ said Tanna, turning to Kotov. ‘The ones you called universal assemblers? They were activated long enough to allow vox-traffic and safe passage to the surface. If we can get to one of those towers could you reactivate it and create a window where we might use our vox?’
Kotov nodded slowly. ‘I believe so.’
‘You believe so?’ said Tanna. ‘I thought the Mechanicus only dealt in certainties. Can you or can you not?’
‘I do not know,’ answered Kotov, the admission clearly hard to make. ‘Were this a loyal forge world, my answer would be an unequivocal yes, but this is Telok’s world. Its machine-spirits are loyal to him and him alone.’
‘It’s got to be worth the risk,’ said Surcouf.
‘Agreed,’ said Anders. ‘So where’s the nearest one?’
‘Working on it,’ replied Pavelka, scrolling through reams of data on the hissing screen. From the strain in her voice, it was clear the hub’s systems were proving uncooperative.
‘Got one,’ she said at last. ‘There’s a universal assembler tower seventy-three point six kilometres north-east of our position. Exloading an optimal route now.’
Tanna saw the schematics of the chamber overlay his visor’s display, complete with directional tags and waypoint markers.
‘Received,’ he said as the glass screens on the hub flickered and the waterfall of binary vanished.
And in their place was the grainy, distorted image of a leering, waxen-featured face.
‘Telok!’ cried Pavelka, withdrawing her mechadendrites from the hub as though it were poisoned. Surcouf and Anders leapt away as the eldar drew their blades.
The four servitors Tanna and Varda had removed from the hub’s bench seats sat bolt upright, their desiccated flesh creaking like old leather as they turned their heads towards the Imperials.
Implanted optics shone with pale light and the vox-masks of their lower jaws crackled with spitting static. The voice that issued simultaneously from all four was unmistakably that of Archmagos Telok.
‘Ah, there you are, Kotov,’ said the servitors with one loathsomely interwoven voice. ‘I wondered how long it would be before you revealed yourself with a clumsy attempt to inveigle your way into my systems.’
‘Shut it down!’ ordered Tanna. ‘Cut the link right now!’
‘I can’t,’ cried Pavelka.
Tanna unloaded a three-round burst of mass-reactives into the hub. It exploded from within, showering Pavelka, Anders and Surcouf with broken glass and molten plastic. The image of Telok vanished, but the link to the servitors remained hideously active.
‘I don’t mind admitting that the sight of your eldar allies surprised me,’ continued Telok via his corpse-proxies. ‘Tell me, was that some kind of warp gate the witch opened?’
‘The Adeptus Mechanicus has fallen far in my absence if it now stoops to such decadent bedfellows. The sooner I wrest control of Mars from the Fabricator General the better.’
‘You betrayed everything you once stood for, Telok,’ said Kotov, glaring at the servitors. ‘You betrayed me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Kotov,’ laughed Telok, and the servitors attempted to mimic his amusement to grotesque effect. ‘Do you really think this was ever about you? All you are to me is a means to an end. You and your little band will not evade capture for long. I built this world. There’s nowhere you can hide where I won’t find you.’
‘I’ve heard enough,’ said Tanna. ‘Kill them.’
Ariganna Icefang was moving before he finished speaking. The exarch beheaded two of the servitors with one slash of her shrieking sabre and crushed the skull of a third with her segmented claw-gauntlet. Varda clove the last meat-puppet from collarbone to pelvis with a blow from the Black Sword.
Telok’s voice fell silent, but his threat hung over them like a corpse-shroud.
‘We need to go,’ said Surcouf. ‘Right now.’
Microcontent 07
If Vettius Telok had to pick a single flaw to which he was most beholden, it would, he reflected, most likely be vanity. How else could he explain leaving Kotov and his fellows alive long enough to escape into Exnihlio’s depths?
It momentarily amused him that even one as evolved as he could still fall prey to so mortal a vice, so human a failing. Being starved of contact beyond that of machines and slaves had rendered him susceptible to flattery, craving of adulation. He had paid for that vanity with an arm, hacked from his body by the blade of an eldar warrior-construct no less!
Who could have expected eldar to have come to Kotov’s rescue? The odds against such unlikely saviours appearing beyond the edge of the galaxy were so astronomical as to be virtually impossible.
