Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  ‘Thor’s balls, I think you’ve just killed me!’ gasped Coyne, spitting a mouthful of clear liquid to the deck. He dropped to his knees and retched wetly, though he held onto the muck he’d just eaten in the feeding hall.

  Abrehem swallowed the acrid liquid with difficulty, tasting all manner of foul chemicals and distilled impurities in its oily texture. It fought to come back up again, but he kept it down with a mixture of determination and sheer bloody willpower. When the initial flare of Hawke’s vile brew had subsided, there was, he had to admit, a potent aftertaste that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  ‘Well?’ said Hawke.

  ‘I’ve certainly drunk worse stuff than this in dockside bars,’ he said at last.

  ‘That’s not saying much,’ said Hawke with a hurt pout.

  ‘It’s about the best recommendation I can give you,’ said Abrehem. ‘Give me another.’

  Hawke smiled and bent to the collection of hydro-drums, fuel canisters, copper tubing and plastic piping that siphoned off liquids from Emperor-only-knew-where and filtered them through a tangled circulatory system of tubes, distillation flasks, filtering apparatus and burn chambers. None of its constituent parts looked as though it was fulfilling the purpose for which it had been designed, and Abrehem read entoptic substrate codes that suggested at least two dozen machines elsewhere were now missing vital parts.

  ‘How the hell were you able to build this?’ asked Coyne, rising to his feet and holding out his tin cup for a refill.

  ‘Guard knowhow,’ said Hawke, handing Abrehem a cup and taking Coyne’s. ‘It’s a bloody poor soldier who can’t figure out a way to make booze aboard a Navy ship on its way to a warzone.’

  ‘This isn’t a Navy ship,’ pointed out Abrehem. ‘It’s Mechanicus.’

  ‘Only makes it easier,’ said Hawke. ‘There’s so much stuff lying around that you can’t help but find a few bits and pieces no one’s using any more.’

  Abrehem sipped his drink, wincing at its strength. ‘But some of these pieces are pretty specialised, how did you get hold of them?’

  Hawke gave him a wink that might have been meant to reassure him, but which came off as lecherous and conniving.

  ‘Listen, do you want a drink or not?’ said Hawke. ‘There’s always ways and means you can get hold of stuff when you’re on a starship. Especially one where there’s men and women with needs. Especially one where a man with an eye to satisfying those needs can... facilitate them to fruition. Let’s just leave it at that, okay?’

  Abrehem wanted to ask more, but something told him that he wouldn’t like any of the answers Hawke might give him. Not for the first time, he wondered about the wisdom of allying himself with a man like Hawke, a man whose morals appeared to be situationally malleable to say the least.

  They’d followed Hawke from the feeding hall into the dripping corridors that ran parallel to their dormitory accommodation. Steam drifted in lazy banks from heavy iron pipes that shed paint and brackish water in equal measure. Crusha led the way, ducking every now and then as a knot of pipework twisted down into the space, and Abrehem and Coyne were soon hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of needlessly complex corridors, side passages and weirdly angled companionways.

  The chamber Hawke had finally led them to was wide and felt like a cross between a temple and a prison chamber. The ceiling was arched, and skulls and bones were worked into the walls like cadavers emerging from tombs sunk in some forgotten sepulchre. Faded frescoes of Imperial saints occupied the coffers on the ceiling, and a hexagonal-tiled pathway traced a route to a blocked-off wall inscribed with stencilled lettering rendered illegible by the relentlessly dripping water and oil. Whatever had once been written there was now lost to posterity, though Abrehem reasoned it couldn’t have been that important, judging by the neglect and abandonment of this place.

  Hawke’s still was set up against the blocked-off wall, and Abrehem saw smeared shimmers of code lines snaking across it. None were strong enough to read on their own, and he blinked away the afterimages, wondering why there would be any power routed through this section at all.

  ‘How did you even find this place?’ asked Abrehem.

  ‘And what is it?’ added Coyne. ‘It’s like a crypt.’

  Hawke looked momentarily flustered, but soon shook it off.

  ‘I needed somewhere out of the way to get the still put together,’ he said, with a lightness of tone that sounded entirely false. ‘Took a walk one night and found myself just taking turns at random, not really knowing where I was going. Found this place, and figured it was perfect.’

  ‘I’m amazed you can find your way back,’ said Abrehem. ‘It’s a bloody maze down here.’

  ‘Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?’ said Hawke. ‘I started out trying to remember how I’d got here; left turn, right turn, straight ahead for a hundred metres, that sort of thing, but it never seemed to matter. I always got here, and I’d never quite remember how I did it. Same on the way out.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve been sampling too much of your own product,’ said Coyne.

  ‘No,’ said Hawke. ‘It’s like this place wanted me to find it, like I was always going to find it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Hawke shrugged, unwilling to be drawn further and realising he’d said too much. ‘Hell, what does it matter anyway?

  Abrehem made a slow circuit of the chamber as Hawke spoke. He reached out to touch the wall with the faded stencilling, feeling an almost imperceptible vibration in the metal, as though some unseen machinery pulsed with a glacial heartbeat on the other side. Code fragments squirmed over the metal towards his hand, sub-ferrous worms of light drawn to the flow of blood around his flesh. Abrehem felt a weight of great anger and terrible sorrow beyond the metal and stepped back, flustered by the raw surge of volatile energies contained within this mysterious chamber.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ he said at last. ‘We shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Hawke. ‘It’s a good place, quiet, out of the way and it’s still got a little juice flowing through it.’

  ‘You ever stop to wonder why?’

  ‘No, what do I care? It’s a Mechanicus ship, there’s power flowing all through it to places the tech-priests have likely forgotten about. This shine’s going to make a lot of people very happy, eh?’

  ‘For a price,’ said Abrehem.

  ‘A man’s got a right to earn something from his labours, ain’t he?’

  ‘We’re little better than slaves,’ pointed out Abrehem. ‘What could any of us have that would be worth anything to you?’

  ‘Folks have always got something to trade,’ said Hawke. ‘Favours, trinkets, their strength, their skills, their... companionship. You’d be surprised what people are willing to offer a man in return for a little bit of an escape from their daily grind.’

  ‘No,’ said Abrehem sadly. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  The fleet began its final approach to the Mandeville point with two of the escorts from Voss Prime and the Adytum in the vanguard. Cardinal Boras followed close behind, with Wrathchild and Moonchild prowling the flanks of the Speranza. The Renard was now berthed in one of its cavernous holds, for there was no reason to maintain a flight profile when it could be carried aboard a bigger ship instead. Archmagos Kotov was taking no chances on losing the Renard before Captain Surcouf could provide him with navigational computations for space beyond the Halo Scar.

  High above the engine wake of the Ark Mechanicus, Mortis Voss kept watch on their rear, for this was when the fleet was at its most vulnerable. As the fires of the plasma engines cooled and the fleet bled off speed, it also lost the ability to fight and manoeuvre effectively. Corsair fleets often lurked in debris clusters, hollowed out asteroids or electromagnetically active dust clouds before pouncing on prey vessels. The power of the Kotov Fleet was likely proof against any suc
h ambush, but piratical attacks were not the only danger to ships preparing to collapse the walls between realities.

  Situated far from the sucking gravity well of the sun, the Mandeville point represented the region of space that centuries of experience and hard-won knowledge had identified as the best place to breach the membrane separating realspace and warp space. A ship could translate into the warp elsewhere, of course, but such were the risks involved that any means of reducing the danger was worth the extra transit time to the more distant Mandeville point.

  The Speranza would make the first breach, her warp generators spooling up with enough force to rip a gateway into the warp for the rest of the fleet to use. It was difficult enough to maintain fleet cohesion after a warp translation at the best of times, harder still if each ship had to tear its own path through. Better that one ship shouldered the hard work for the rest, and the Speranza was easily capable of such an expenditure of power.

  Cocooned Navigators and mentally-conjoined astropaths would maintain links between the fleet, but nothing about travel through the warp was certain, and astrogation data, together with emergency rally points, was passed between each shipmaster.

  Blade of Voss and Honour Blade circled back around, their engines flaring brightly as their mater-captains performed hard-burn turns to bring them in close to the vast ship at the heart of the fleet. Each ship in the fleet undertook complex manoeuvres to bring them in tight to the Speranza, clustering at ranges that in terrestrial terms were enormous, but in spatial topography were dangerously close. Every ship shut down all but the most vital auspex systems, for it was better not to know too much of the substance of the warp beyond the shimmering bubble of the Geller field.

  Satisfied its cohorts were isolated in their own silent shrouds, the Speranza unleashed salvoes of screaming code bursts, warning any nearby ships to keep their distance. Though the Ark Mechanicus was a ship of exploration, she was not without teeth, and had more than enough power reserves in her vast capacitors to defend herself in the event of any surprise attack. Echoing howls of hostile machine language warned of dire consequences for any ship that dared approach.

  With the echoes of its binaric challenge still echoing through space, the spatial environment smeared with ghostly blotches of unlight, shimmers of an unseen world brought dangerously close to the surface. Like a stagnant pool, wherein dwelled unseen and unknowable abominations and whose hidden depths have for good reason remained invisible, the edges of the warp were horribly revealed. Immaterial tendrils of sick light bled into realspace, a glistening discoloured tumour bulging into the material universe where the malevolent reflections of things dreaded and things desired were made real. Like an ocean maelstrom given sentience, a whorl of bruised colours and damaged light oozed from a point in space ahead of the fleet, gradually widening as ancient machinery and arcane techno-sorcery conceived in an earlier age tore the gouge in space ever wider.

  A suppurating wound in the material universe, the space around it buckled in torment, loosing tortured screams unheard by any save weeping astropaths and Cadian primaris psykers locked in psychic Faraday cages. Even those without the curse of psychic ability felt the tear opening wider, its abhorrent presence occupying multiple states of existence that violated the first principles of the men who sought to codify the real world in the earliest millennia of the human civilisation.

  No conventional auspex could measure so unnatural a phenomenon. Its boundaries existed on no level of being that could be measured in empirical terms. Its very appearance made a mockery of any notions of reality, and only instrumentation conceived in fits of delirium by men whom science deemed mad in ages past could even acknowledge its presence.

  The Speranza’s plasma engines flared with a last, eye-watering burst of power as it made for the dark heart of the warp fissure. Nebulous slivers of nullplasmic anti-light engulfed the mighty vessel, swallowing it whole and folding around it like some nightmare predator that had lured its prey into its jaws with gaudy displays of colour.

  One by one the ships of the Kotov Fleet translated into the warp.

  Though most translation events were timed to occur when the fewest number of crewmen were on their nightside rotation and bells were rung throughout the ship to keep men from their nightmares, it was inevitable that some would pass between worlds while asleep. Few Cadians slept, knowing better than most the risks of such a lapse after numerous translations between the void and the warp.

  Prayers were said, offerings and promises made to the God-Emperor to keep them safe, lucky talismans kissed and whatever rituals a man believed might keep him safe were enacted throughout the fleet. Confessors and warrior priests toured the dormitory spaces of every ship, hearing the fears of those who could keep their terror at bay no longer.

  For the duration of a warp journey, every living soul was a fervent believer and pious servant of the Golden Throne, but if the Ecclesiarchy priests cared that this upswell in absolute devotion was temporary, they did not say.

  Likewise, few of the Adeptus Mechanicus slept, their biological components’ requirement for rest overruled by their artificial implants in anticipation of the translation. Aboard the Adytum, the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes knelt in silent contemplation of their duty, watched over by the implacable form of Kul Gilad. He knew the signs of warp intrusion, and kept vigil on his warriors for any hint that the insidious tendrils of the warp had taken root. He expected no trace of such corruption, but only by eternal vigilance could such expectations be maintained.

  Cortex-fused armsmen prowled the decks of every ship, alert for any sign of danger, shot-cannons and shock mauls at the ready. Translation was always a time fraught with disturbances; fights whose cause no one could quite remember, raving sleepwalkers, suicide attempts, random acts of senseless violence, delirious bouts of uninhibited sex and the like.

  Throughout the fleet, men and women experienced nightmares, sweating palpitations, gloomy premonitions of their own death or prolonged bouts of melancholia. No one relished the prospect of translation, but there was little to do but endure it and pray to the God-Emperor that the journey be over swiftly.

  Nor were the destabilising effects of warp translation confined solely to the mortal elements of the fleet; its mechanical components suffered similar trauma. On every ship, from the most complex machines that were beyond mortal understanding to the simplest circuits, the technology of the Kotov Fleet felt the fear of new and impossible physical laws that interfered with their smooth running. Glitches bloomed and a hundred faults developed every minute, keeping the tech-priests, lexmechanics and servitors working shift after shift to ensure nothing vital failed at the worst possible moment.

  Of all the components in the fleet, only one slept through the translation, and they suffered nightmares the like of which no ordinary soul could comprehend. Deep in the hearts of the recumbent Titans, the fleshy minds that allowed the wolf hearts of the Legio Sirius to fight writhed in the grip of amniotic nightmares. To spare their princeps the worst effects of translation, the tech-priest crews had shut them off from the outside world, sealing each singular individual in their milky prisons with only memories of past lives to sustain them.

  Past glories and victories stretching back thousands of years were usually enough to keep each princeps from suffering the worst effects of translation, but not this time. Alpha Princeps Arlo Luth dreamed of scuttling creatures with bladed limbs infesting his titanic frame, of worm-like burrowers coring him hollow from the inside out and enormous bio-titans crushing his metal body beneath their impossible biology.

  He thrashed his vestigial limbs in mute horror, unable to scream or beg the tech-priests to wake him. Luth’s every link to the outside world was closed off to him, but Lupa Capitalina felt his pain and shared it, its systems flaring in empathic fury.

  Its weapon systems and threat signifiers briefly overcame the Mechanicus wards keeping it quiescent, and i
t loosed a shuddering blast of its warhorn as auto-loaders and power coils surged to life. Hundreds of panicking tech-priests and Legio acolytes responded to the battle-engine’s sudden ascent to its war-footing, but before they could do more than register the danger, the Titan’s machine-spirit sank back to dormancy.

  No trace of what had caused the Capitalina’s aggressive surge could be found, and the senior magi of the Legio put the episode down to a quirk of translation bleed into the machinery of the Speranza’s inertia-cradles.

  But they were all wrong.

  With the departure of the Ark Mechanicus, the infected wound of the translation point snapped shut as the tortured skein of what mortals blissfully accepted as reality reasserted its dominance. The aftershocks of so brutal a manipulation of the laws governing the physical properties of the universe would echo throughout the past and the future, for such concepts as linear time simply did not exist in the warp.

  Bielanna felt the violence of the human fleet’s shift into the warp and eased her hold on the wraithbone heart of the Starblade. The ship rode out the last of the warp spasms, its captain climbing, diving and yawing in time with the amplitude of the temporal and causal wavefronts unleashed by the brutal violation of real space.

  She opened herself to the infinity circuit, allowing her mind to flow through the living structure of the Starblade. Glittering points of light sparkled like starlight in the Dome of Dreams Forgotten, warp spiders at work repairing cracks in the wraithbone where stresses on the hull had cracked the carefully grown spars that gave the ship its deceptive strength. She avoided the warp spiders, leaving them to their unthinking labours as she eased through the ribs of the giant vessel and felt the hot neutron wind roaring past the hull and filling the solar sails with energy. Vast reservoirs of power burned in the heart of the Starblade, resources harvested from the aether and the almost limitless reserves of the stars.

  Bielanna felt the firefly soul-lights of the crew, each one a weaving thread upon the skein, each one a vista of potential stretching out from the now and into the myriad pissible nows. Some she felt close to, others she knew only from what the infinity circuit told her of them. Every eldar on board the Starblade was touched by the infinity circuit, and each left their mark upon it.