Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Hydraq. ‘You think Alhazen has it?’

  ‘I do,’ said Enaric, his optical implants glittering with avarice. ‘And I want you to get it for me.’

  Hydraq heard a whisper of motion behind him.

  But only because she let him.

  ‘All clear up top?’ asked Aurora.

  ‘You almost certainly already know the answer to that.’

  ‘Only almost?’

  ‘Fine, definitely.’

  ‘You’re right. I do know,’ she answered.

  ‘Then why ask?’

  ‘I like to hear you tell me things as if you’re in charge.’

  ‘I am in charge,’ he said.

  She smiled and he forgave her as he always did. He nodded towards the supine form of Simocatta, unable to keep a grimace from his face at the man’s emaciated flesh.

  ‘Duqu’s not bitten yet?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Aurora, her voice clipped and utterly devoid of accent. He’d heard her speak like a Terran hiver, a Jovian doxy and a Bakkan aristocrat. He didn’t know for sure what her real voice sounded like, and she claimed not to remember. Had a life spent training with the tech-priest assassins of the Cydonian Sisterhood erased her true voice?

  ‘He’d better bite soon,’ said Hydraq. ‘There’s only so long the forge’s long-range augurs will believe we’re a scav-clan.’

  ‘He will. I watched Duqu for three months in Basiri. He’s the type to bite. That’s why I chose him.’

  Aurora moved past him and his impressions came, as they always did, in sharp jolts of awareness, as though each element was only revealed at a moment of her choosing. Midnight-blue drakescale bodyglove of non-reflective polymers, slim physique with a fractional augmetic lengthening of the skeletal structure. Narrow hips, narrow shoulders and long coppery hair worn in a tightly-wound plait. The overriding impression was of verticality, and her facial features were no different. Ever so slightly tapered; chin, sweeping blades of cheekbones and large auburn eyes that appeared natural, but almost certainly weren’t.

  ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘You always say that before we start.’

  ‘It’s true,’ he said, taking a step towards her.

  ‘Careful,’ she said, with a quarter turn. ‘I’m armed.’

  A pair of short, rapier-like knives with dulled black handles emblazoned with a bull’s head was sheathed at the small of her back. A matching pair of matte-black pistols were slung at her hips, unique in the truest sense of the word.

  ‘So am–’ he started to say, before remembering that he’d hung his wrath-pattern by the main door. Aurora shook her head with a grin. He sighed.

  ‘Is your speeder ready?’ he asked, to change the subject.

  ‘As ready as it can be without actually moving.’

  ‘Good, I got a feeling when this is over, we’ll need to make a sharp exit.’

  ‘Trust me, when I get behind its controls, there’s nothing within a hundred light years that can see it, let alone catch it.’

  Aurora made her way towards the door and Hydraq’s eyes followed her. Only a wheezing intake of breath from Simocatta made him drag his eyes away.

  ‘And we’re in,’ said Simocatta, his eyes blinking and milky with tears as they refocused on his surroundings. Tubes gurgled and the web of drips and intravenous chem-shunts began feeding him fresh nutrients and electrolyte-rich fluids.

  ‘Has he bit?’ asked Hydraq, moving closer only with great reluctance.

  ‘Of course he bit, my sceptical comrade-in-arms,’ said Simocatta, sighing as the stimms hit his system. ‘Didn’t I tell you he would? Our dear Duqu found the data-spike just where I instructed Mistress Aurora to leave it, and, reading its heraldic sigil of Archmagos Alhazen, carried it within Forge Basiri. From that moment it was a statistical certainty he would slot the spike in a commendable, albeit foolish, desire to determine its ownership.’

  ‘Omnissiah, bless the naïve,’ grinned Hydraq. ‘How long before the code exloads to his sensory augmetics?’

  Simocatta reached up to an intravenous dispenser and adjusted his nutrient cycle with practiced ease.

  ‘I work with the craft of Hephaestus and the speed of Hermes,’ said Simocatta with an elaborate wave of hand, like a nobleman’s salute to his subjects.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means the link is established and the polymorphic is wearing away Adept Duqu’s defences as we speak.’

  ‘It’s already exloading?’

  ‘My dear Hydraq, you didn’t pay me to craft slow code, now did you?’

  ‘Damn it, Simocatta,’ snapped Hydraq. ‘Start with that!’

  Simocatta laughed as Hydraq ran to his own chamber. Aurora was waiting for him. She’d already known what Simocatta was going to say.

  ‘Your heart rate’s high,’ she said, as if she could see it.

  For all Hydraq knew, perhaps she could.

  He nodded and took a moment to compose himself, controlling his breathing and forcing his heart-rate lower. He eased himself into the Aquila’s grav-couch. It moulded to his body like a second skin, and he let himself sink into its embrace.

  He felt his body relax. Now that the hunt was on, all the tension jangling along his nerves vanished. This was what he was born to do and his confidence calmed him.

  ‘Better,’ said Aurora, unsnapping two lengths of copper cabling from his cogitator terminal. ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But if we pull this off…’

  Aurora shrugged. ‘Can we trust Enaric?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he answered. ‘That’s why I have you.’

  ‘So you do.’

  Closing his eyes, he said, ‘I am what I bring in,’ and took the cables from Aurora’s porcelain-smooth fingertips. He slotted the jacks home in the sockets drilled just behind both ears. ‘Only that and nothing more.’

  ‘You say that every time,’ said Aurora.

  ‘You say that every time,’ he said, running his hand over the surface of his cogitator. ‘It helps me deal with the Red Static. Listen, don’t underestimate the importance of ritual.’

  ‘I’m on Mars, how could I forget?’ she said as his hand slid into the palm-shaped depression of the cogitator’s upper surface. The activator rune was warm beneath his skin.

  He let out a breath, feeling the thrumming power of the machine beneath his hand. The potential it represented.

  ‘Good hunting,’ said Aurora, bending to kiss his forehead.

  ‘That helps too.’

  ‘Then this will go smoothly?’

  ‘Smooth as glass,’ he promised, and pressed the activator rune.

  Falling down a light-filled tunnel. Rushing motion, sickening vertigo. The sense of being drawn out to a chain a molecule thick. Connection was always difficult, but this…

  This felt like it was stretching him past breaking point.

  Then, like taut elastic, he snapped back.

  Vertigo again. Motion blur, quickly followed by nausea.

  He fought it, knowing it wasn’t real.

  Inner ear balance that wasn’t his. A centre of gravity altered. Someone else’s body.

  New sensations. All unpleasant.

  Adjust, damn it. Get a grip.

  The nausea diminished, the sense of dislocation passed.

  Light and three-dimensional space unfolded. Dimensions had meaning again. The vectors of X, Y and Z restored.

  He sat before an angled panel of riveted steel, inset with a convex data-slate displaying lines of hexamathic cascades. And there, slotted through the inload port, was the data-spike Simocatta had contrived to have Duqu find. The crossed telescope device of Archmagos Alhazen was clear on the spike’s base.

  Decades had passed since Hydra
q had processed advanced multi-dimensional geometry, and most of the data-slate’s contents before him – no, not him, Adept Duqu – was beyond his understanding. In the corner of the slate was a blinking smirr of static, an entirely unremarkable visual glitch, common to all data-slates.

  Except this was no glitch, this was Simocatta’s covertly-running infiltration data, bypassing the forge’s security protocols entirely and opening the door to Adept Duqu’s augmetics.

  Twenty-four fingers tapped a clicking dance over brass-rimmed keys of opal. With every key-strike, their cuckoo in the nest took in more of the polymorphic code. Duqu’s single overhanging mechadendrite snapped a carriage return back each time the panel’s scrivener-quill filled a page.

  Adept Duqu’s full attention was focused on his work. The man was completely unaware the sensory inputs of his augmetics had been hijacked. Oblivious to the fact, he was becoming less and less himself with every passing moment. Only when a fractional misalignment in Simocatta’s canticles caused a visual glitch in the ocular interface did he pause in his labours long enough to look up.

  Through Duqu’s eyes, Hydraq saw he was seated on the overseer’s pew of a Parity Scriptorium. Five thousand adepts sat in ordered ranks before him like supplicants. Faceless drones whose work Duqu – along with dozens of other stern-faced adepts – was monitoring for integer discrepancies. Chain-hung fluorescent lumens made what little skin was visible shimmer with a sickly, bleached-out sheen.

  The vaulted chamber stretched into the distance, the roof coffered in palladium and hung with alloyed banners depicting the ongoing conquest of knowledge over ignorance. In the spaces between cogged pilasters and surveillant picters, devotional frescoes, hundreds of metres long, panelled each wall.

  The hazed blur vanished from the corner of the data-slate. The polymorphic was done. Time to get moving.

  Time to taste the Red Static.

  Hydraq unleashed a surge of myriad hostile tech he’d encountered over the decades: scrapcode fragments, dissembler code he and Pavelka had worked on; line-breakers and hijackers all. Enough to overwhelm a moderately protected system, and Simocatta’s shape-shifting canticles had rendered Adept Duqu defenceless.

  The link between the adept and Hydraq roared with jagged lines of blood-red static. The adept’s enhanced nervous system went into agonising spasms as Hydraq barraged him with false code, hexamathic dead ends and geometrically-increasing information requests.

  Howling, snapping and stabbing spikes of aggressive code filled obscured Duqu’s vision, but the link went both ways. Hydraq’s body would feel this too, with only the grav-couch and Aurora to keep his spine from breaking in repercussive convulsions. He couldn’t feel it yet, his sensory apparatus intimately linked with Duqu, but he would.

  He’d experience it with interest when his senses returned to his own flesh. The thought of that sent a squirming knot of panic deep into his gut.

  Duqu tried to call for help, but the Red Static had already shut him down to all external communications. To all intents and purposes, Duqu might as well have been alone on one of the black gaols orbiting Titan.

  Then it was over.

  The Red Static fell away and the frescoed chamber swam into focus. Duqu’s hands sat unmoving on the metalled keyboard. The organic portions of his anatomy were spiking across the board, but Hydraq sent calming blurts of binary and balms into the adept’s floodstream.

  Adept Hydraq?+

  The voice in his skull was Simocatta’s.

  Don’t call me that,+ said Hydraq. +But, yes, it’s me.+

  Excellent news. You have full control?+

  He lifted his hands. Not Duqu’s, his. They moved by his volition, and he ran through a series of basic motor/cognitive exercises to assess the level of his systemic integration.

  I do,+ he said.

  Hydraq owned Duqu, body and soul. His consciousness occupied the throne in the adept’s neurocortex, and there was nothing the screaming adept could do about it.

  Sending you the prefix codes now,+ said Simocatta, all levity and pomposity gone now that they were on mission. Perhaps he had underestimated the man. Too bad they’d never work together again.

  Got them,+ said Hydraq as reams of information appeared in his memory, data he had no recollection of acquiring. It was simply knowledge he possessed and felt like he always had.

  Enter the commands swiftly, Hydraq,+ said Simocatta. +The authority signifiers will not linger in your short-term memory.+

  I won’t need them long,+ Hydraq assured him.

  He flexed his fingers, quickly adjusting to the extra digits on each hand, and inserted a series of root commands into Forge Basiri’s infrastructure. All were far above Duqu’s rank, but each was prefixed by authority signifiers provided by Magos Enaric. With that finished, he requisitioned a flyer on a southern platform and filed a flight plan he never intended to follow.

  Done,+ said Hydraq as each command was accepted. He shut down the slate and inloaded acausal locks that would take days to break.

  Based on distance and the mean striding velocity of Adept Duqu, it should take you no more than fifty minutes to reach the central data core,+ said Simocatta.

  I’d best get moving then,+ said Hydraq.

  Is it my turn now?+ asked Simocatta, and Hydraq grinned as he heard the man’s mischief over the sensory link.

  Yes, it’s your turn,’ said Hydraq. ‘Run the Night Dragon.+

  Simocatta cut his link to Hydraq. The plans he had sourced would be enough to guide the man through Basiri.

  And he had mayhem of his own to unleash.

  Decades spent strengthening dataspheres to resist attack from hostile scrapcode had given Simocatta preternatural insight into the best way to exploit a forge’s vulnerability.

  Not even the best networks could avoid mutational errors in their system architecture or cracks in their protection. Even the deep security of Olympus Mons could be broken open by the right operators using the right code.

  As Simocatta knew to his cost.

  Dark Mechanicus adepts had cracked a Primus-level datacore under his aegis. They had stolen standard template construct schematics for armour-penetrating warheads that were now wreaking havoc in warzones surrounding the Eye of Terror.

  From being courted by the highest adepts of Mars, Simocatta’s star had fallen and fallen hard. Now his genius turned to breaking open the very places he had once protected, forced to whore his genius to scabby little men like Hydraq.

  Still, at least it paid well.

  And wealthy men could expunge anything from their history.

  The infocytes had completed their sourceless connection to the planetary network, and Simocatta let his consciousness descend into the golden ocean of knowledge and data circling the Red Planet.

  He let out a soft sigh, feeling the vastness of the Martian datasphere, an infinite vista of knowledge rendered as light. It humbled him and awed him. It filled him with wonder that his species had learned so much, then touched him with sadness to know how much had been lost.

  The surface of Mars was like a newborn star raging with thermal currents, plasma storms and coronal ejections. Binaric brilliance shone in radiant hurricanes around the mountainous datastacks and greatest of these were the forge temples. Each was the fiefdom of a great magos of Mars, with molten streams of datalight pouring from them.

  Simocatta was far more interested in what was going into the forges. Most had their own geothermal power cores, but that alone could not hope to supply the energy demands of a fully functioning forge-temple.

  The bulk of their energy was drawn from the titanic atomic cores spread throughout the quadrangle, each burning with the light of sullen stars. Volatile cores imprisoned and enslaved by the works of man, each was held in a delicate balance between explosive detonation and dormancy.

  Simocatta split his consciou
sness into proxy avatars and despatched them into the data flow surrounding each reactor. Sensing unauthorised presences, Ouroboros Protocols rose to intercept them, monstrous coils of idiot data whose only purpose was to burn out an attacker’s neocortex.

  He knew full well how exquisitely lethal these protocols were; he’d conceptualised their core systems. They circled his avatars like glossy black snakes, unthinkingly hostile and ferociously hungry.

  Come then, my beauties,+ said Simocatta. +Feast. Devour.+

  They flew at his avatars and tore them to shreds in a frenzy of hyper-violent deletions. Simocatta had designed the Ouroboros Protocols as a slash and burn form of defence. Unsubtle and indiscriminate, but thorough.

  Except in this case, that very thoroughness was their undoing. Each of Simocatta’s avatars was nothing more than a shell, a delivery system for something far worse.

  The Night Dragon: weaponised data crafted by an ancient renegade known simply as Malevolus that had no purpose except to destroy. The binaric equivalent of the most diabolical venom imaginable. And the control mechanisms for a dozen atomic reactors all across Sinus Sabeus had just ingested it.

  Sudden panic flared brightly within each reactor complex as the Night Dragon went to work. It burned out control systems and wreaked havoc within the regulatory mechanisms of rapidly overheating cores.

  Simocatta had spent decades attempting to develop a defence against the Night Dragon, but had never succeeded.

  He doubted anyone else had either.

  Hydraq’s progress through Forge Basiri was swift.

  He’d left the Parity Scriptorium without comment, though numerous eyes had followed his unscheduled departure. Embedded memories of the forge’s layout guided him through its brightly-lit pathways.

  His sole deviation was to enter a Machina Opus temple, where he retrieved a pair of moulded plastek melta-pistols that Aurora had hidden beneath a reinforced ironwork pew. The basalt structure was deserted but for a handful of dark-armoured Techmarines of the Sable Swords. The gigantic transhumans looked up as he entered, but instantly dismissed him as was typical of their breed.