Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  ‘They’d hurt us, but they’d forgotten the first rule of an ambush: hit hard and fast, and then get the hell out. Navy ships are old, but they’re tough and can take a lot of punishment before they need to disengage. The tau thought they’d crippled us and they pressed the attack when they should have broken off. Blue Lighter turned and blew away two ships before they got close to us and then went for the warspheres.’

  ‘A Space Marine strike cruiser is a force multiplier not to be underestimated,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ said Roboute. ‘It gutted those warspheres. They couldn’t manoeuvre fast enough and the Ultramarines just savaged them, blowing out great chunks of their structure with their bombardment cannon and then broadsiding them again and again. It wasn’t pretty, and when the tau cruisers got in close with us, we showed them that it takes more than a sucker punch of an ambush to take Imperial ships of the line out of a fight. It got scrappy and ugly, but we pinned them in place, and when Blue Lighter charged in, it was all over.’

  ‘A worthy fight,’ said Dahan. ‘I am inloading the data from the Manifold now. You neglected to mention that you earned multiple commendations in that engagement, Captain Surcouf. You received a Bakkan Heart for being wounded in battle, and the Invigilam’s captain put your name forward for the Naval Laurel, the Macharian Star and recommended that you be given command rank at the earliest available opportunity.’

  ‘Captain Cybele was a good man,’ said Roboute. ‘He didn’t want to lose me, but he knew I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had my own ship.’

  ‘Ships do not belong to their captains,’ pointed out Magos Saiixek, his crimson robes billowing with escaping gusts of freezing air.

  ‘My apologies, magos, a figure of speech,’ said Roboute.

  ‘So did you get a command?’ asked Colonel Anders.

  ‘No, though I was promoted to the rank of executive officer aboard the Preceptor, a Gothic-class cruiser laid down in the orbitals of Gathara Station two thousand years ago. She’d been assigned to Battlefleet Tartarus, and Captain Mindarus... well, let’s just say he was a man who’d risen to captaincy through a combination of luck, connections and brazen riding on the coat-tails of his betters.’

  ‘Such a thing would never happen in a Space Marine Chapter,’ said Kul Gilad, as though daring anyone to contradict him. ‘Skill at arms alone decides who commands.’

  ‘The Preceptor is listed in the Manifold as destroyed with all hands,’ said Magos Dahan. ‘The data is corroborated by Naval fleet registry and has parity with Adeptus Mechanicus logs. How is it that you are still alive?’

  ‘Yes, the Preceptor was destroyed, and I was aboard it when it happened,’ said Roboute.

  ‘How is that possible?’ asked Linya.

  ‘Because Captain Mindarus was an arrogant fool who knew next to nothing about void war. He came from an old Scarus family that had sent all its sons to the Navy, and he thought that was enough when it came to commanding a warship.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Anders.

  The dining room had grown quiet, every officer and magos gathered at the table listening intently to Roboute’s tale. He felt the room growing smaller; a gradual sense of claustrophobia settling upon him as he recalled the final voyage of the Preceptor. He took a deep breath and thought of the astrogation compass in his stateroom, with its needle’s doomed attempts to find a bearing.

  ‘We’d been hunting a reaver fleet that was using the Caligari Reef asteroid belt to raid convoys coming in through the Auvillard Mandeville point,’ began Roboute. ‘The Preceptor had a solid bridge crew and we felt confident we could take on anything they threw at us, even with Mindarus at the helm, but what we didn’t know was that the reavers weren’t acting alone, they had help.’

  ‘What kind of help?’ asked Magos Dahan.

  ‘Arch-Enemy help,’ replied Roboute, feeling the aggressive swell of emotion in the room. Cadians knew from bitter experience how terrible it was to fight the monstrous enemies that struck from the Eye of Terror. To Cadian regiments, battles against Archenemy forces were about more than just victory, they were personal. Though the fate of the Preceptor was clear to every man around the table, Roboute could feel them willing his tale’s ending to be different.

  ‘We never found out the name of the ship that attacked us,’ Roboute said eventually. ‘The vox-officers and auspex-servitors were killed in the opening minutes when it screamed at them. Flash-burned their brains in their skulls before we even realised it was there. A blood-red hellship rushed us from the cover of a rad-shearing asteroid and scattered our escorts in a frenzy of battery fire. At the same time it hit us with multiple lance batteries that tore down most of our shields in a matter of minutes.

  ‘Even so we weren’t out of the fight, but Mindarus panicked and tried to break contact instead of hitting back. He turned us about over my strenuous objections and diverted power from the shields to the repair crews and engines. I tried to reason with him, to tell him that we needed to fight our way clear, not run like a scared grox-pup. He screamed at me that I was being mutinous and ordered the bridge armsmen to escort me from the bridge.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Anders.

  ‘The armsmen were just about to clap me in irons when the hellship strafed us with some kind of particle whip. Stripped away the last of the shields and lit up our topside like a fireworks display. I don’t know what that weapon was, but it tore right through the ship and breached clean through to our lower decks. Vented half the crew compartments to space and emptied out the gun decks before we could fire back. Feedback damage and secondary explosions blew back into the bridge and a firestorm gutted damn near every station. I was lucky, the armsmen shielded me from the blast, but most of the command staff were little more than charred corpses or screaming, melted lumps of fused bone and ash. Some of the bravest men I’d served with were dead, but that bastard Mindarus was still alive and still screaming that we’d failed him, that this wasn’t his fault. Can you believe it? His ship was dying around him and he was still looking for someone else to blame for his stupidity.

  ‘Our escorts were gone. They’d fled when they’d seen us go down, and when the reavers swarmed out after the hellship I knew we were dead in the void. We were leaking atmosphere and those few compartments that still held air were on fire. The Preceptor was dead, no question about it, and when Mindarus disengaged from his command pulpit and yelled that I had to escort him to the saviour pods... well, that’s when I snapped.’

  ‘Snapped?’ asked Anders. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that I shot him,’ said Roboute, eliciting a gasp of surprise from his audience. Even the magi managed to look shocked.

  ‘I took out my sidearm and blew his damned head off,’ said Roboute. ‘He’d killed us and he wanted to abandon his ship? I couldn’t let that stand, so I emptied my power cell into his corpse.’

  Roboute took a deep breath, remembering the moment he’d dropped his pistol on top of the las-seared body of Captain Mindarus. He’d felt nothing; no righteous elation or vindication, just an emptiness that had lodged in his heart like a splinter.

  ‘You killed your captain?’ asked Anders.

  ‘Yes, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat,’ said Roboute. ‘His incompetence saw thousands of men dead.’

  ‘Then he did not deserve to live,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘You did the right thing, Captain Surcouf.’

  ‘It didn’t matter anyway. There was nothing left to do but wait for the hellship to finish the job. We were burning and losing atmosphere, but there was still enough of our hull and onboard systems to make us worthwhile salvage. I knew it was only a matter of time until the Preceptor was boarded, so I gathered up every firearm I could find and waited for the enemy boarders to come. I’d kill as many as I could and save one bullet for me. No way was I letting them take me. I waited on that scorched bridge for hours
on end, but they never came.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  Roboute shook his head. ‘Not at the time, no. Most of our auspexes were down and I wasn’t in a hurry to plug into what was left of surveyor control. I could hear the hellship’s screams, even though there was nothing left of the vox-system. It screamed for days, but then it just stopped and I knew it had gone. Maybe there were other survivors, I never found out, but all I’d done was postpone the inevitable. I couldn’t leave the bridge without losing atmosphere, and the temperature was falling rapidly. I didn’t have any food or water, and I knew the compartment was losing pressure as the integrity of the structural members began to fail. Ice on the hull kept it from venting explosively, but I had a few days at best before I was a dead man, either from cold or dehydration. I thought about putting a gun to my head to get it over with quickly, but that’s not the Ultramar way. You never give up, never stop fighting and never lose hope.’

  ‘A bleak situation,’ said Vitali Tychon. ‘I am intrigued to learn how you survived.’

  ‘It’s simple,’ said Roboute. ‘I was picked up by another starship.’

  ‘The statistical likelihood of being rescued by a passing ship is so utterly improbable that it might as well be zero,’ said Magos Blaylock. ‘In any case, the Arch-Enemy vessel must surely have been aware of any craft sufficiently close to reach you in time. Why would it not engage this other ship?’

  ‘The hellship didn’t engage because it knew it couldn’t win,’ said Roboute.

  ‘How is that possible?’

  Roboute took a deep breath before answering.

  ‘Because it was an eldar ship,’ he said.

  Stunned silence greeted Roboute’s pronouncement. They had perhaps expected to hear of a last saviour pod, one of the Preceptor’s escorts returning to look for survivors or some other account of good fortune; miraculous, but explicable as one of the many facets of war that beggared belief.

  None of them had expected xenos intervention.

  ‘An eldar ship?’ growled Kul Gilad.

  ‘Yes,’ said Roboute. ‘A warship of Alaitoc craftworld called Isha’s Needle. It had been hunting the hellship for decades and was on the verge of springing its own trap when we blundered into its snare by accident.’

  ‘Why would they even bother to pick you up?’ asked Anders. ‘Don’t misunderstand, I’m glad you survived, but it seems more likely the eldar would happily see you die.’

  ‘I never found out why they picked me up,’ said Roboute. ‘Not for sure. I don’t even remember much of how they got me off the Preceptor, just a strange light dancing like a miniature whirlwind by the bridge pulpit where I’d decided I was going to die. Then a figure in red armour, with some kind of elongated pack, appeared from the light and lifted me up. The next thing I remember I was waking up in a soft bed with my burns wrapped in bandages and skin grafts.’

  Kul Gilad leaned forwards and Roboute felt his simmering hatred.

  ‘I have lost brave warriors to the eldar,’ said the Reclusiarch. ‘Five warriors whose deeds are etched in the last remains of the Annapurna Gate, heroes all. Emperor’s Champion Aelius fell at Dantium not more than a year ago. A pack of screaming killers took his head and their warp-bitch stole away the remains of his sacred blade.’

  ‘I grieve with you, Reclusiarch,’ said Roboute. ‘I know how painful it is to lose men under your command. I lost a whole ship of men and women that depended on me.’

  ‘How long did you live among the xenos?’ asked Kul Gilad.

  ‘Almost a year. They treated me well enough, but I got the feeling I was never more than a passing curiosity to them, a whim they might soon tire of. I only ever met a handful of the crew; the healers who treated my wounds, and a pair of sculptors named Yrlandriar and Ithandriel.’

  ‘A ship of war numbered sculptors among its crew?’ said Kul Gilad, plainly disbelieving.

  ‘Sculptor is about the best analogy I can think of,’ said Roboute. ‘They made artwork, certainly, but I think that was just a byproduct of what they really did aboard ship.’

  ‘Which was what?’ asked Linya.

  ‘They called themselves bonesingers, which I think meant they could fix parts of the ship when they were damaged or create new parts if they were needed. I once watched them grow a new section of hull from little more than a sliver no bigger than my fingernail. It was truly amazing.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Magos Blaylock. ‘I have long believed that eldar technology is fashioned from a form of bio-organic polymer that is, in its own way, alive. Their ships are essentially grown as opposed to being built.’

  ‘You always did have an unhealthy interest in xenotech, Tarkis,’ said Saiixek, farther down the table. ‘Unnatural. You forget the Ninth Law: the alien mechanism is a perversion of the True Path.’

  ‘You speak with the wilful ignorance of one who has chosen not to study the technology of xeno-species,’ retorted Blaylock. ‘And you are forgetting the Sixth Law: understanding is the True Path to Comprehension.’

  ‘The Omnissiah does not dwell within such blasphemous creations. You heard the rogue trader, their technology is grown. It is not built, it does not have the sacred mech-animus at its heart. Such xeno-species are an affront to the Imperium and the Machine-God. Rightly are they abhorred.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Kul Gilad, interrupting the nascent theological discussion between the magi. ‘What did you tell the eldar of the Imperium?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Roboute. ‘They never asked me about the Imperium and seemed entirely uninterested in it. I told them of my life in Ultramar, the beauty of Iax and Espandor, the wild mountains and oceans of Macragge. I told them of feast days and my youthful misadventures, nothing more. If they’d rescued me to learn our secrets then they didn’t do anything to find out what I might know.’

  ‘At least not that you were aware of,’ said the Reclusiarch. ‘Eldar witches can lift a man’s thoughts from his mind with their sorceries. They are fiendish and possess nothing in the way of honour or morality as we know it. They think to make the race of Man their puppets, little more than pieces to move around a cosmic regicide board to prolong their wretched existence.’

  Roboute knew this was not an argument he could ever win with a Space Marine, and said, ‘I can only speak as I find, Reclusiarch. The eldar treated me well, and once they tired of me I was left on a planet in the Koalith system, just outside an Imperial city. And the rest, as they say, is history.’

  There was more to it than that, of course, but there were limits to how far honesty would carry him in such company. How Roboute had gone from refugee to rogue trader would have to remain a story untold for now; too many of this audience would not approve, understand or condone his subsequent actions.

  And if Kotov knew the half of it, there was yet time to throw him and his crew off the Speranza.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘What’s for dessert?’

  The final course was a platter of sugared pastries and soft-fleshed fruit with a pink centre. Roboute was relieved to feel the attention that had been focused on him now shift, like a sniper with more important targets to hunt. Localised conversations sprang up as the magi debated the merits and perils of studying alien technology, while the Cadians swapped stories of previous engagements and wild speculation on what enemies they might come up against on the other side of the Halo Scar. The Space Marines excused themselves before dessert was served, and Roboute saw they had touched little of the previous course.

  ‘Didn’t they like the food?’ he wondered.

  ‘I suspect it is because this meal is nutritionally valueless to them,’ said Linya. ‘The calorific content and mass-to-energy ratio of the meat and protein substitutes makes it virtually irrelevant to their digestive systems. It would be like you eating your napkin and expecting to be sated. Space Marine foodstuffs are necessarily high in nutrients, amino acids an
d complex enzymes to sustain the wealth of biological hardware in their systems. Were you unwise enough to eat so much as a mouthful your body would suffer an explosive emetic reaction.’

  ‘I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds unpleasant,’ said Roboute.

  ‘For you and anyone nearby,’ said Linya.

  Roboute laughed and took another drink from a passing servitor.

  He took a mouthful of dammassine and said, ‘So what were you telling the colonel before I arrived? Something about why you and your father came on this voyage? And don’t tell me it’s because of the love of exploration. That might be part of it, but I know there’s more to it than wanderlust.’

  Linya’s expression, which had been faintly indulgent up until now, turned serious.

  ‘You’re perceptive, Roboute,’ she said. ‘Though I’ll admit the thought of exploring unknown space on the other side of the Halo Scar is appealing, you’re right, it isn’t what brought us here.’

  ‘Then what did?’

  She sighed, as though pondering the best way to answer. ‘How familiar are you with celestial mechanics? The life cycles of stars and the physics of their various stages of existence?’

  Roboute shrugged. ‘Not very,’ he admitted. ‘I know they’re huge balls of gas with incredibly powerful nuclear reactions at their hearts, and that it’s best to keep them as far away as possible when you’re making the translation to warp space.’

  ‘That’s about all most spacefarers need to know,’ said Linya. ‘But there’s so much more going on inside a star that even the most gifted calculus-logi couldn’t begin to unravel the complexity of the reactions and their effects on the magneto-radiation fields in the surrounding chaotic systems.’