Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  ‘Do it now, or I will shoot you where you sit.’

  ‘You’re crazy!’ shouted Koskinen.

  ‘You have until I count to three. One, two...’

  ‘Shit, Hyrdrith,’ barked Koskinen. ‘All right, I’ll plug in, just put that gun away.’

  ‘We plug in together,’ said Hyrdrith. ‘Understood?’

  ‘Yes, understood, damn you.’

  Koskinen hefted the Manifold connector, the gold-plated connector rods looking like daggers aimed at his brain. Normally communion through the Manifold was a sacred moment, attended to by a host of tech-acolytes, with numerous applications of oil balms and anti-inflammatory gels, but this was about as far from normal as it was possible to get.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Hyrdrith, sounding hatefully matter of fact.

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘Connect,’ said Hyrdrith, and Koskinen plugged in, feeling the cold bite of linkage through the golden connector rods in the back of his skull. A surge of furious anger and heat instantly enveloped his body, his back arching with the shock of it. Acidic data poured through neurological veins, stimulating every nerve ending with pain emissions, and pumping the full range of aggressor-stimms into his cardiovascular system. Koskinen bellowed with animal fury, feeling the angry heart of the Capitalina clawing at his mental processes.

  Coupled via a moderati’s Manfold link, his connection to the bellicose spirit of the Titan was superficial, yet almost overwhelming.

  What must it be like for Princeps Luth, twin souls woven together in one warlike purpose?

  Koskinen fought against the anger, knowing it wasn’t his own. Titanicus eidetic training took over, fencing off those parts of his brain worst affected and concentrating on restoring his situational awareness. Shoals of data light swam into focus as the full range of auspex inputs rose up to meet him. A hiss of terror escaped his lips as he saw the hordes of approaching creatures, millions of individual surveyor returns that blurred into one homogenous mass of inputs.

  ‘God of All Machines, save us...’ he hissed. ‘So many of them!’

  said a voice that cut across his thought processes. Magos Hyrdrith, also plugged into the Manifold.

  Koskinen took a deep breath and forced himself to relax his haptic grasp on the firing controls for the plasma destructor, unaware he’d even summoned them to his hand. The weapon’s power coils were charging of their own accord, but thankfully release authority still lay with the moderati. He ran an interpolation scan of the inloading surveyor inputs, seeing a vast swarm of creatures surrounding them, working with a terrifying degree of co-ordination that was chilling in its instantaneous reaction.

  And suddenly he knew what he was looking at.

  ‘It’s Beta Fortanis...’ he said. ‘Why does he think we’re back on Beta Fortanis?’

  said Hyrdrith.

  ‘He’s having a nightmare?’

  answered Hyrdrith.

  ‘Then how do we wake him up?’

 

  ‘Great,’ said Koskinen, looking closer at the hallucinatory auspex readings and feeling a gnawing wave of nausea clamp his gut. ‘I remember this attack pattern... Luth’s fighting the tyranid swarms at Sulphur Canyon! The battle where... oh, hell.’

  said Hyrdrith.

  ‘I’m trying,’ he grunted, pouring all his command authority into disarming the weapon. ‘But the Capitalina’s damn determined that she wants it.’

  The engine lurched around the last remains of what had once been a recreation of a clock tower, where enemy missile teams had hidden until Amarok had sawn its upper levels off with vulcan fire. Amid the spurious returns from the non-existent tyranid swarms, Koskinen picked out the panicked icons of the Legio’s Warhounds as they scrambled for cover. Canis Ulfrica moved through the ruins ahead of them, traversing the shattered buildings as it picked up speed in an attempt to get out of Lupa Capitalina’s path.

  Heat spikes burned his hand, and Koskinen flinched, even as he recognised the pain was illusory.

  ‘Plasma destructor’s coming online!’ he yelled. ‘I can’t stop it.’

  ordered Hyrdrith.

  Koskinen glanced over at Princeps Luth’s amniotic tank, the liquid trapped within churned like the bottom of a silty lake. A shape swam out of the murk, a wizened face of sutured eyes, coil-plugged ears and a tube-fed mouth. Amputated arms that trailed silver wires from the elbows beat the glass in fury, and the awful, stretched-parchment skin of the bulbous head smeared blood on the glass as it twisted left and right, staring out at them and seeing only enemies.

  Koskinen linked himself to Luth’s tank and, as calmly as he was able, said, ‘It’s not real, my princeps. What you’re seeing, it’s not real. This battle is a year old. They hurt us, yes, but we walked away from the fight alive. We beat those xenos bastards!’

  Luth’s monstrous head turned in his direction, though there was no way he could see him. Koskinen had no idea whether Luth could even hear him, thinking back to the chaos of the battle against the hive creatures in that claustrophobic canyon. Fighting blind in yellow steam that billowed up from sunken caverns, millions of scurrying, chitinous monsters swarming their legs, dropping from the cliffs above or soaring on the billowing thermals.

  Luth swam out of sight, swallowed by the viscous liquid of his tank.

  ‘He’s too far gone, Hyrdrith,’ said Koskinen. ‘He’s going to take the shot.’

  said the magos.

  ‘No use, she’s drawing power from the shields,’ said Koskinen, wiping away firing solutions as quickly as they appeared at his stations. More were being generated every second, and he saw it was just a matter of moments until he would be overwhelmed and one made it through to the plasma destructor. He felt a burning pressure in his arm as the battle-engine brought its mighty weapon-limb to bear. Koskinen fought against it, desperately trying to keep his arm immobile, but against the strength of the Capitalina’s ancient wolf heart he was a mote of dust in a hurricane.

  cried Hyrdrith.

  ‘What do you think I’m bloody trying to do?’ grunted Koskinen, sweat pouring down his face.

 

  Koskinen glanced through the canopy as Lupa Capitalina took another step forwards and his panel lit up with too many firing solutions for him to dismiss them all. Canis Ulfrica filled the canopy, but fire control warbled with a positive lock on a holographic outline Koskinen recognised from Sulphur Canyon.

  A tyranid bio-titan that had almost outmatched them in the final moments of the battle.

  ‘Omnissiah forgive us...’ he said, searing heat enveloping his fist. ‘We have a lock!’

 

  ‘Too late!’ screamed Koskinen as Lupa Capitalina’s plasma destructor unleashed the power of a star’s heart at one of their own.

  Engine. Kill.+

  The Iron Fist slammed down over a berm of rubble, roaring at maximum capacity towards the Titans. What little had been left standing after their war walk was little more than crushed debris beyond salvaging. Dahan tried to fathom what was going on, but could make no contact with the princeps of Lupa Capi
talina. The Warlord braced its legs, and its right arm came about in fits and spasms, as though suffering from actuator damage.

  The Sirius Warhounds skulked behind the mighty engine, loping in confusion as they blared alarm from their warhorns. The Reaver faced off against the Warlord, caught with nowhere to run to and stripped of any cover by their very thoroughness in the exercise. Its carapace sparked and squealed as its crew raced to bring voids back online, and squalling interference wavelengths created a shimmering rainbow around its frontal armour plates. Its guns were raised, and the rotating barrels of its gatling blaster were spinning up to firing speed.

  What had possessed Sirius to fight each other?

  What manner of slight could bring two such awesomely powerful war machines to blows?

  Without full access to the Legio Manifold, Dahan could not communicate directly with either princeps. The best he could do was transmit through the shared command network frequencies to demand answers. His hindbrain kept up a barrage of demands for the Legio to pull back from its war footing, while he linked with the Speranza’s noospheric network and warned the archmagos of what was happening.

  The Warhounds took note of him and the smaller of the pair, Vilka, broke away from its maddened prowling to rack the loaders of its guns and loose a howl of warning. Encoded in every scrap of that howl was one clear imperative.

  Stay away!

  Dahan brought the Iron Fist to a skidding halt before the Warhound.

  ‘What is the Legio doing?’ he voxed, hoping that someone, anyone, in Sirius might answer him. ‘You must stop this madness now!’

  Stay away!

  ‘For the love of the Omnissiah, stand down!’ yelled Dahan in the vocal, binaric and noospheric spheres. ‘Put up your weapons, I beg of you!’

  A fiery haze of superheated light built along the length of Lupa Capitalina’s arm, the plasma destructor’s firing vents squealing as they prepared to bleed off the volcanic excesses of heat. Knowing what was to come next, Dahan dropped into the Iron Fist and slammed the hatch down after him, hoping it would be enough. Inside the tank, Dahan closed the Iron Fist off from the outside world, disabling its auspex, vox and pict feeds.

  He slammed the vehicle into full reverse, and even through the armoured hull and over the roar of the engine he could hear the plasma destructor draw in a screaming intake of breath.

  ‘Bracing,’ he said, shutting down as many of his own extraneous systems as he could manage in the microsecond he had left before the engine’s gun reached optimal firing temperature.

  And a thunderclap of pulverising thermic energy slammed into the tank, burning through its refractor fields in an instant and melting through a handspan of ablative plating. The internal temperature of the tank’s crew compartment flashed to that of a blast furnace, and what little skin Dahan had left peeled off in an instant.

  Before he could even register the pain, the kinetic blast wave of the Titan’s weapon discharge plucked the Iron Fist from the deck and swatted it like a troublesome insect.

  Hawkins heard the Titan’s enormous weapon screaming as it drew breath to fire, and hurled himself into the lee of a fallen building. Rae and a score of soldiers rolled into cover with him, while others ran for shelter behind armoured vehicles, piles of debris or whatever else might protect them from the backwash.

  Imperial Titans were a welcome sight on any battlefield, but you didn’t want to be anywhere near them when they fired plasma weapons. The heat bleed would scour the ground for hundreds of metres in all directions, and the thermal shockwave would give anyone caught in the open a damn nasty flash burn. He didn’t want to think what might happen in the pressurised, oxygenated atmosphere of a starship...

  ‘What in the Eye’s going on, captain?’ shouted Rae.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ said Hawkins, risking a glance through the shattered brickwork of the building. Dust clouds from the manoeuvring Titans billowed around them, making precise details hard to come by, but Hawkins saw the largest engine with a searing lightning storm chained to its arm. Another Titan stood with its back to him, fighting to keep itself out of the firing line, but even a relatively agile Reaver couldn’t evade a Warlord forever.

  ‘What is he doing?’ whispered Hawkins.

  Warhorns blared; threat, challenge and supplication all in one.

  Whatever the Reaver was doing to try and defuse the larger Titan’s anger, it wasn’t working.

  ‘Cover your ears and don’t look up!’ shouted Hawkins. ‘Here it comes!’

  He pulled back from the gap in the wall and pressed the heels of his hands against the side of his head. He put his head in his lap, exhaling as the colossal plasma weapon fired and filled the training hangar with a deafening thunderclap of igniting air. The temperature spiked and a flashbulb image was burned on Hawkins’s retinas. Instantaneously a seething wave of heat billowed over them, a blistering desert wind of dust and debris. Walls crashed down throughout the ruined city, blown down by the force of the recoil-blast in a confined space.

  Despite his own orders, Hawkins looked up in time to see the enormous blue-white bolt of incandescent plasma as it streaked overhead. Too bright to look at, it was the blinding radiance of an eclipse and a supernova all in one. Scads of molten metal trailed from its outer edges as it flashed the length of the training hall and slammed into the vast, skull-faced bulkhead at its rear.

  Hawkins braced himself for an explosion, but the vast, super-heated plasma bolt simply punched through the heavily-plated bulkhead as though it wasn’t even there. He tried to blink away the painful neon afterimages, but they wouldn’t go away and he cursed his foolishness in looking up. A shrieking cloud of wind-borne matter blew past, and the wall behind him groaned as the hammerblow of the thermal shockwave slammed into it.

  ‘Move!’ shouted Hawkins, pushing himself to his feet as the building that had sheltered them from the blast now threatened to come down and bury them alive. He and Rae scrambled away as the building came apart in an avalanche of steel and stone. A piece of broken stone clipped Hawkins on the shoulder, and the force of the impact cracked one of the bones there. He grunted in pain as randomly falling pieces of connective steelwork and modular plates rained down on him and his men. Choking dust clouds surged and swayed in the riotous thermal vortices, tugged this way and that as the venting systems fought to dissipate the heat build.

  Hawkins rolled to his side, clutching his damaged shoulder and spitting a mouthful of bloodstained dust. His ears rang with noise and his vision still wouldn’t properly clear, but he could still see that many of his soldiers hadn’t been so lucky. Most had gotten out from beneath the building in time, but Hawkins saw several arms and legs protruding from the debris, and a soldier whose torso lay buried in the rubble. A number of dust and blood-covered soldiers tried to free him, even though it was obvious the man was dead.

  Hawkins held up his good arm and said, ‘Help me up, Rae. And be careful about it, I think my collarbone’s broken.’

  Lieutenant Rae, almost unrecognisable under a patina of pale ash and black dust, took his arm and hauled him to his feet. Hawkins bit back a cry of pain and wiped blood from his forehead as he tried to gain some measure of the situation. Warning lights flashed overhead and emergency klaxons bellowed in anger as emergency teams of medicae servitors were deployed from recessed chambers. Wounded Guardsmen shouted for medics, while revving Chimeras, Hellhounds and Leman Russ tanks formed defensive laagers on the far side of the ruins. Dazed Guardsmen stumbled through the wreckage, some missing limbs, others with horrific flash burns they would likely not survive, and still more with skin scorched red by the heat wash of the plasma weapon.

  ‘Holy God-Emperor...’ breathed Rae.

  The little that had been left standing of the ruined city was gone, its prefabricated structures and multiple blocks flattened beneath the plasmic pressure wave radiating from the centre of the devastati
on. Lupa Capitalina shimmered in a distorting heat haze, wreathed in clouds of steam as its weapon arm vented super-heated plasma discharge. Its warhorn blared a scream of triumph, but even as Hawkins picked out its towering form through the smoke and dust, the sound changed to one of anguish as it beheld the destruction it had unleashed.

  Canis Ulfrica swayed in front of the larger battle Titan, its right arm and much of its shoulder carapace simply burned away. Flames and drooling cables that spat arcs of lightning guttered from the wound. With the aching slowness of a wounded Guardsman who’d only just realised the gunshot in his chest was mortal, Canis Ulfrica sank to its knees with a booming crash that reverberated around the training halls. She fell no further, and a shrieking wail of grieving binary issued from the augmitters of every member of the Cult Mechanicus.

  Despite the losses his own men had suffered, Hawkins felt tears prick the corners of his eyes to see so mighty a machine humbled. The two Warhounds circled the fallen Reaver, their heads thrown back and their warhorns blasting out howls of primal loss.

  As destructive as the plasma bolt loosed by Lupa Capitalina had been in the training halls, it was nothing compared to the devastation yet to come. Confined in an oxygen-rich environment without the vastness of an atmosphere in which to dissipate its heat and ionising electrons, the plasma burned volcanic as it streaked the length of the Speranza. It burned its way through the starboard solar collector arrays, shattering millions of precision-finished mirrors and melting support struts machined to nanoscopic tolerances. The brittle detonations of countless looking-glasses sounded like a glassy sea crashing on a steel shore, and the reflected heat boiled the flesh from the bones of the floating servitors whose lives were spent in keeping the mirrors free of imperfections.

  Another bulkhead was sliced through with horrifying ease, the superstructure around the chamber sagging as a central tension bar snapped like overstretched elastic. In the vaulted chambers behind the solar collectors, vast capacitors, long since beyond the reach of any in the Adeptus Mechanicus to reproduce, were reduced to thousands of tonnes of scrap metal as the plasma bolt bored through machines dreamed into existence in a past age. Irreplaceable technology melted to molten slag and a thunderclap of electrical discharge exploded from the mortally wounded machinery as it screamed in its death-throes. Every metal structure within five hundred metres became lethally charged with thousands of volts, and hundreds of ship-serfs died as they were electrocuted in leaping arcs of red lightning.