Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  Hawkins shook his head. ‘I doubt it. Wouldn’t be much of a fight, and I’ll lose a week’s pay if he’s beaten.’

  ‘Emperor love you, sir, but you didn’t put money down on the magos to win?’

  ‘Yeah, I think he’s got a trick or two up his sleeve.’

  ‘But... but these are Space Marines,’ said Rae, as though the folly of Hawkins’s bet should be self-evident

  ‘And Dahan’s a Secutor. Don’t underestimate how dangerous that makes him.’

  ‘Fair enough, sir,’ said Rae. ‘But betting against a Space Marine seems, well, just a little bit...’

  ‘A little bit what?’

  ‘Rebellious?’ suggested Rae after a while.

  ‘I promise not tell the commissars if you don’t.’

  Rae shrugged, and turned his attention back to the participants in the bout. All around him, men and women were making bets on the outcome of the fight, but he ignored their shouts of odds and amounts, concentrating on what the duellists were doing. The Black Templars stood unmoving behind Kul Gilad, and it was impossible to take their measure. Their markings made them all but indistinguishable, though one wore armour of considerably greater ornamentation, as though he were the most glorious embodiment of their Chapter. His helmet bore an ivory laurel, and a huge sword, over a metre in length, was sheathed across his shoulders. Where the rest of his brethren carried enormous boltguns, he carried a single pistol, gold-chased and well worn.

  ‘It’ll be him,’ said Hawkins. ‘Mark my words.’

  Rae nodded in agreement as Magos Dahan swept back his robes, revealing a muscular body of plastic-hued flesh with gleaming steel ribs visible at his chest. In addition to his regular pair of arms – which Hawkins now saw were laced with gleaming metal implants, augmetic energy blades and what looked like digital weapons – a second pair of arms unfolded from a position on Dahan’s back. These arms were each tipped with a forked weapon that sparked to life as crackling purple lightning arced between the bladed tines. Dahan’s body rotated freely at the waist, allowing him a full circuit of movement, and his three legs were reverse jointed, ending in splayed dewclaws that unsheathed with a sharp snik.

  ‘Still think I’m onto a losing bet?’ asked Hawkins as Dahan lifted his long polearm from the topside of his tank. The serrated blade revved with a harsh burr and the clawed energy pod at its base crackled with kinetic force.

  ‘Trust me, you’ll be glad you didn’t bet a month’s pay,’ replied Rae.

  Dahan launched into a series of combat exercises, rotating the long blade around his body with his upper arms in an intricate pattern of killing moves. His legs were weapons too. While two bore his weight, the third would lash out in a disembowelling stroke.

  Kul Gilad nodded at the sight of Magos Dahan’s preparatory moves, and circled around the lethal envelope of the Secutor’s reach.

  ‘Who do you think, Tanna? Who will best this opponent?’ asked Kul Gilad, and the bearded warrior who had attended Colonel Anders’s dinner stepped from the statue-still ranks of the Space Marines.

  ‘It should be Varda, he bears the honour of us all,’ said Tanna.

  The warrior with the great sword stepped from the ranks of the Templars, and the enormous curved pauldrons of his armour shifted as he loosened the muscles at his shoulders.

  ‘See, told you it’d be him,’ said Hawkins.

  Kul Gilad held up a hand and shook his head. ‘No, the Emperor’s Champion does not fight unless there is death to be done. His blade kills in the name of the Master of Mankind, not for spectacle or vainglory. To make our point it must be the least of us who carries our honour. Step forwards, Yael.’

  The sergeant struggled to hide his astonishment. ‘Yael is only recently made a full Templar, he has yet to shed blood with his brothers in the Fighting Company.’

  ‘That is why it must be him, Sergeant Tanna,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘The High Marshal himself marks this one for greatness. Do you doubt his wisdom?’

  The sergeant knew better than to argue with a superior officer when so many others were watching, and said, ‘No, Reclusiarch.’

  Tanna stepped back into rank along with the Emperor’s Champion as a slighter figure marched to stand alongside Kul Gilad. He wore a helmet so it was impossible to guess his age, yet he carried himself proudly, a young buck out to make his name. Hawkins had seen the same thing in the regiment, young officers straight out of the training camps outside Kasr Holn eager to prove their worth by getting into the nastiest fights as soon as they could.

  Some got themselves killed. The ones who didn’t die learned from the experience.

  Both outcomes helped to keep the Cadian regiments strong.

  Kul Gilad stood before Yael and placed his heavy gauntlets on his shoulders. Unheard words passed between them and the warrior knight nodded as he drew a sharp-toothed chainsword and his combat knife.

  Kul Gilad stood between Dahan and Yael.

  ‘Let this be an honourable duel, fought with heart and courage.’

  ‘To what end will we fight?’ asked Dahan. ‘First blood?’

  ‘No,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘A fight is not done just because someone bleeds.’

  ‘Then what? To the death?’

  The Reclusiarch shook his head. ‘Until one fighter can make a killing blow. Take the strike, but do not let it land.’

  ‘I have muscle inhibitors and microscopic tolerances in my optics that will enable such a feat. Can your warrior say the same?’

  ‘Afraid you might get hurt?’ said Yael, and though his voice was modified by the vox-grille, Hawkins could hear his youth.

  ‘Not even a little bit,’ said Dahan, dropping into a fighting position and lifting his multiple arms.

  Kul Gilad stepped back. ‘Begin!’

  Dahan did not attack at once, but circled his opponent carefully, using his optical threat analysers to accumulate data on this opponent; his reach, height, his weight, his likely strength, his foot patterns, his posture. He had expected to fight the bigger warrior with the laurel-wreathed helm, but if the Reclusiarch thought to confound his combat subroutines by presenting him with an unexpected foe, it was a poor gambit.

  He kept his Cebrenian halberd slightly extended, one of his servo arms above it, the other below. Crackling sparks of electricity popped from the forks, each shock-blade’s charge strong enough to stop the multiple hearts of a raging carnifex. He eased around on his waist gimbal, letting his dewclaws click on the deck in a slow tattoo. Just the sight of his combat-enabled body was enough to unnerve most opponents, but this warrior appeared unfazed.

  He decided to test the mettle of his opponent with something easy, a feint to gauge his reaction speed and reflex response. The Cebrenian halberd slashed at Yael’s head, but the Templar swayed aside and batted away the killing edge, spinning around and resuming his circling. He was employing Bonetti’s defence, a tried and tested technique, but one that would struggle against an opponent with four arms.

  Capa Ferro would be the logical mode of attack against such a defence, but from the motion profile he had already built up, Dahan suspected his opponent was luring him into such an attack. His footwork was that of the great swordsman of Chemos, Agrippa, but his grip was Thibault.

  A mix of styles, then.

  Dahan smiled as he realised his opponent was taking the measure of him also. He gave the warrior a moment’s grace, letting him truly appreciate the futility of attempting to fight an opponent who could predict his every move, who had broken down more than a million combat bouts to their component parts and analysed every one until there was no combination of attacks that could surprise him.

  The Guardsmen and skitarii surrounding them cheered and shouted encouragement to their chosen fighter, but Dahan shunted his aural senses to a higher frequency to block them out. Vocalised noise was replaced by hissing machine noise, code blurts a
nd the deep, glacial hum of the Speranza’s vast mind emanating from the heart of the ship.

  Yael launched his first attack, a low cut with his combat blade, which Dahan easily parried with the base of his halberd. He rolled his wrists, pivoting on his waist gimbal to avoid the real strike from Yael’s chainsword. Dahan brought one metal knee into the Templar’s stomach, driving him back with a crack of ceramite. He followed up with a jab from his shock-claws. The blades scored across Yael’s arm, cutting a centimetre into the plate. A pulse of thought sent hundreds of volts through the blade, but the Templar didn’t react and stepped in close to drive his sword blade at Dahan’s chest.

  The second shock-claw blocked it, and he spun the base of his halberd up into Yael’s side. A burst of angry code blared in his ear as the halberd’s entropic capacitor sent disruptive jolts of paralysing code into the Templar’s armour. Yael staggered as his armour’s systems flinched at the unexpected attack, struggling to keep from shutting down and resetting. Dahan leaned back on one leg and brought his two front legs up to slam into the Templar’s chest, knocking him back with punishing force. Yael hit the deck hard and rolled, sparks flaring from his power pack.

  Dahan followed up with a leaping attack that drove the gold blade of the halberd down at the deck. Yael rolled aside, pushing himself upright with a burst of strength and speed that surprised Dahan. Clearly the bellicose spirits in Yael’s armour were better able to resist attack than most machine souls.

  Yael slashed his sword low, but Dahan lifted his leg over the sweeping blade. His halberd stabbed down again, the blade turned aside by a forearm smash. Yael spun inside Dahan’s guard and drove his combat blade up to his chest. Twin shock-blades trapped it a hair’s breadth before it plunged into his hardened skin. Dahan sent a burst of crackling force through the blades and the knife blew apart in a shower of white-hot shards of metal.

  Dahan slammed the haft of the halberd into Yael’s chin, leaning over almost at ninety degrees to his vertical axis to punch his shock-blades into his opponent’s side. Yael dropped to one knee with a roar of pain as coruscating lines of purple lightning danced over his armour. Even as he fell, Dahan was in motion, circling behind the fallen Templar and drawing back his halberd for what would be a beheading strike.

  He braced his legs and brought the blade around, but even as he did so he felt the sudden pressure of Yael’s sword against his groin assembly. Shocked, Dahan looked down. The Templar still knelt, as though at prayer, but the blade of his sword was thrust back between his torso and his left arm. The tip of the blade was touching Dahan’s body, its madly revving teeth now stilled. Instantaneous calculations showed that the blade would penetrate a lethal twenty-five centimetres before his own blade could end Yael’s life.

  ‘A killing strike,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Dahan, returning his shock-blade arms to the rest position at his back and pulling his halberd upright. ‘This is inconceivable. The permutations of Templar Yael’s fighting patterns, attack profiles and physical attributes did not predict this outcome.’

  Yael stood and turned to face the magos. He sheathed his sword and reached up to remove his helmet. The revealed face was bland, its sharp edges smoothed out by genetic manipulation and enhanced bone density. Isotope degradation from his skeletal structure told Dahan that Yael was no more than twenty-four Terran years old.

  ‘You fought to the classical schools,’ said Dahan. ‘Agrippa, Thibault, Calgar...’

  ‘I have trained in them, studied them, but I do not slavishly follow them,’ said Yael.

  ‘Why not? Each is masterful technique.’

  ‘A fight is about more than just technique and skill,’ said Yael. ‘It is about heart and courage. About a willingness to suffer pain, a realisation that even the greatest warrior can still be humbled by a twist of fate, a patch of loose ground, a mote of dust in the eye...’

  ‘I account for random factors in my calculations,’ said Dahan, still unwilling to concede that his combat subroutines could be in error. ‘My results are certain.’

  ‘Therein lies your error,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘There is no such thing as certainty in a fight. Even our greatest bladesman could be felled by a lesser opponent. To be a truly sublime warrior, a man must realise that defeat is always possible. Only when you recognise that can you truly fight with heart.’

  ‘With heart?’ said Dahan with a grin. ‘How might that be integrated to my repertoire, I wonder?’

  ‘Train with us and you will learn,’ said Kul Gilad.

  Dahan nodded, but before he could reply, a colossal, braying howl filled the training hangar. The sound echoed over the shattered city Dahan had constructed, filled with anger, with nightmares and with madness. The howl was answered and a towering structure of modular steel and permacrete in the heart of the city came crashing down in an avalanche of debris. Dahan’s optics cut through the haze of flame, dust and smoke, but what he saw made no sense.

  The Titans of Legio Sirius were making war on one another.

  Wracking thuds of impact cracked the glass of the princeps tank, and howls of angry code blurts filled the command compartment of Lupa Capitalina. Pulsing icons flashed and warbled insistently as the Titan made itself ready for the fight of its life. Bellowing armaments clamoured for shells, void generators throbbed with accumulating power and the mindless questioning of distant gun servitors clogged the internal vox.

  And at the centre of it all was Princeps Arlo Luth.

  The amniotic tank was frothed with his convulsions, the milky grey liquid streaked with blood like patterns in polished marble. His limbless, truncated body twisted like a fish caught on a lure that fought for freedom. Phantom limbs that had long ago been sacrificed to the Omnissiah writhed in agony, and a wordless scream of horror bled from his tank’s augmitters.

  It had begun only moments ago.

  Lupa Capitalina had been coming about from a successful prosecution of the outer defence districts, pulverising them with turbolasers then filling the ruins with simulated plasma fire. Canis Ulfrica completed the devastation with its barrage missiles, while Amarok and Vilka stalked the ruins to eliminate any last pockets of resistance in storms of vulcan bolter fire.

  Moderati Rosten had been working through the post-firing checklist to power down the guns when Canis Ulfrica had moved into the Capitalina’s field of view. Skálmöld had raised his guns in salute to his princeps, and every single alarm had burst into life.

  Princeps Luth screamed as a violent grand mal ripped through his ravaged flesh. Violent feedback slammed up through the consoles, killing Rosten in a heartbeat, flashburning his brain to vapour and setting him alight from the inside. Magos Hyrdrith was luckier, her inbuilt failsafes cutting off the Manifold just before the feedback hit, but such sudden disconnection brought its own perils. She spasmed on the floor, black fluids leaking from her implants and a froth of oily matter issuing from every machined orifice in her body.

  Koskinen also felt the sympathetic pain of Luth’s seizure, but he had been disconnected from the Manifold at the time. His distress came from seeing his princeps in extremis and his fellow moderati dead. He ran back to his station, flinging his arms up to ward off streams of sparks and hissing blasts of vapour escaping from pressure-equalising conduits. He slid into his contoured couch seat, taking in the readings at a glance. The hololiths surrounding him were alive with threat responders, warning of enemies approaching.

  ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ he said, alternating between reading the threats his panels insisted were drawing nearer with every second, and the ruined city they had just pulverised. Luth was screaming, a sub-vocal shriek of machine language that still managed to convey the terrible agonies he was suffering.

  Koskinen scrolled through the tactical display. According to the readouts, they were surrounded by thousands of enemies, monstrous swarms of fast-movers with hostile intent.
They only told a fraction of the story, but without plugging back into the Manifold there was no way to be sure of what the engine thought it was seeing.

  ‘Hyrdrith!’ he yelled. ‘Get up! For Mars’s sake, get up! I need you!’

  Whether it was his words or coincidence, Hyrdrith chose that moment to push herself upright. She looked about herself, as though unable to process what was happening around her. She clambered to her feet as the deck swayed and the Capitalina took a faltering step.

  ‘Interrogative: what in the name of the Machine-God is happening?’

  ‘You don’t know? Everything’s gone to hell is what’s happening,’ shouted Koskinen. ‘Luth’s having some kind of seizure, and the engine thinks we’re about to come under attack from thousands of enemy units.’

  ‘Do you have the Manifold?’

  ‘No,’ said Koskinen. ‘I think... I think Lupa Capitalina has it...’

  ‘Then get in and take it from her,’ snapped Hyrdrith, bending down to swap the fused cable at her station for a fresh one extruded from her stomach like a coiled length of intestine. She worked with ultra-rapid speed, re-establishing her link to the machine heart of the battle-engine, reciting prayers with each twist of a bolt and finger-weld connection she made.

  ‘You’re insane, Hyrdrith,’ said Koskinen, twisting in his seat to point at the scorched ruin of the opposite moderati station. ‘Look what happened to Rosten.’

  ‘Do it,’ repeated Hyrdrith as the engine took another step and Luth’s howls changed in pitch to something altogether more dangerous. ‘Make the connection, we need to know what’s happening in the Capitalina’s heart.’

  ‘I’m not re-connecting,’ said Koskinen. ‘It’s suicide.’

  ‘You have to,’ replied Hyrdrith. ‘Your princeps needs you to drag him back from whatever affliction drives him to this madness.’

  Koskinen shook his head.

  Hyrdrith pulled back the sleeve of her robe and the stubby barrel of a weapon unfolded from the metal of her arm. A magazine snapped into the gun, engaging with a click and a rising hum.