Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  The hangars of titanic earth-moving machinery fared little better, with a hive-dozer five hundred metres tall cored by the bolt. Fuel cells detonated explosively and the complex machinery at the heart of its engineering deck was flooded with volatile electro-plasma backwash. Hard rubber wheels melted in the heat, and every transparisteel panel shattered with thermoplasmic bloom. A giant crane mechanism, capable of lifting starships between construction cradles, was struck amidships, and the entire upper assembly crashed down into the hold, smashing itself to destruction on the way down and doing irreparable damage to three Goliath lifters and a Prometheus-class excavator.

  And the rogue plasma bolt was still not spent.

  The command deck shone with a blood-red light as alarms, damage reports and emergency subroutines flickered to life. The Speranza shook from end to end, and Archmagos Kotov felt her pain as it reverberated through his connection to the vast machine-spirit. Crackling arcs of power wreathed the archmagos, earthing through microscopic dampers worked into his cybernetic body as he fought to keep control.

  His senior magi were meshed with their stations, each one relaying news of the effects of the disastrous weapon malfunction on the training deck. Magos Saiixek’s multiple arms danced over the engineering consoles, rerouting engine power from the bolt’s path, while Magos Azuramagelli charted potential exit points for an emergency warp translation. Magos Blaylock co-ordinated the ship’s emergency response as Kryptaestrex ran damage control.

  None of the news was good.

  ‘Any more from Dahan?’ asked Kotov, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Negative, archmagos,’ said Kryptaestrex. ‘His floodstream is offline. He is likely dead.’

  The inload from Magos Dahan had come to the command deck incomplete, and further requests for clarification remained unanswered. The fragmentary data the Secutor magos had managed to exload before going offline suggested that one of the Titans of Legio Sirius had fired on another, but what had driven it to do so remained unquantifiable.

  Was is treachery? Had the rot of betrayal and corruption touched one of Sirius the way it had with Legio Serpentes on Uraniborg 1572? The thought sent a shudder of dislocative current through his body, and the Speranza groaned as it felt his fear. Was he to be forever cursed and tormented by the Omnissiah? Was this crusade into the unknown not penance enough to restore him in its infinite graces and binary glory?

  ‘Starboard solar collectors are gone,’ said Tarkis Blaylock, restoring his focus. While Kotov was connected to the ship’s Manifold, Blaylock remained apart from it. To have both senior magi plugged in while such a disastrous turn of events was playing out was against procedure, but Kotov desperately needed Blaylock’s statistical expertise to aid him in co-ordinating the emergency response of the Speranza.

  If Kotov could not have Blaylock, then he would have the next best thing. He exloaded a series of code-frequencies and brevet rank protocols through the noosphere to Linya Tychon, together with a data-squirt of what he required of her. She answered almost immediately, already aware of the danger facing the Speranza. Her inload/exload capacity adjoined his own and the burden of processing the vast ship’s needs eased with another to help shoulder the load.

  Throughout the ship, every magos able to link with the Manifold added their own capacity to calming the wounded vessel’s pain. Entire decks echoed with binary prayers and machine code hymnals, echoing from prow to stern as the Cult Mechanicus bent its logical will to the restoration of pure functionality.

  ‘Is the Geller field holding?’ asked Kotov, diverting a measure of his attention to bridge control.

  ‘It’s holding,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘The field generators are situated in the prow, but with the capacitors offline, their continued operation will burn through our reserves much quicker.’

  ‘Have you calculated an exit point?’

  ‘Working on it now,’ said Azuramagelli, managing to convey his irritation even through the expressionless vista of his brain jars.

  ‘Construction engine Virastyuk reports ninety per cent degradation of functionality,’ reported Magos Kryptaestrex, his sonorous voice like that of a mother listing her dead children. ‘Lifter Nummisto is destroyed. Rigs Poundstone and Thorsen are damaged too. Badly.’

  ‘Where is the plasma fire now?’ demanded Kotov. ‘How far has it burned?’

  ‘It is in the aft decks, burning through the transport holds,’ answered Blaylock. ‘Integrity fields have failed, and the loss of atmosphere has helped bleed off 102K of plasmic energy, though the tesla strength of the bolt remains unaffected. Thirty-two per cent of our drop-ship fleet has been blown into the warp, together with forty-five per cent of the Guard’s armoured vehicles.’

  Kryptaestrex grunted, his multiple arms and wide body jerking with the force of his displeasure.

  ‘The Cadians aren’t going to like that,’ he said.

  ‘If we cannot dampen this fire, then their dislikes will be the least of our concerns,’ said Kotov. ‘When this is over, I will build them replacements in the prow manufactories. Now where are my containment doors?’

  ‘Blast containment shields are raising between sections Z-3 Tertius Lambda and X-4 Rho,’ said Blaylock, reading the damage-control inloads from noospheric veils of light. ‘There is an eighty-three point seven per cent chance they will not halt the blast and it will breach the main plasma combustion chamber.’

  ‘But they will at least dampen its force?’

  ‘To some degree, yes,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘But given the enhanced conditions for plasma burn aboard ship, they will not stop it.’

  ‘Vent the chambers beyond,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘It’s the only way.’

  ‘No,’ said Saiixek. ‘Those are the worker habs for the engineering decks. I need those menials to maintain engine efficiency. Diverting to obtain more would greatly delay our mission.’

  Abrehem bent to remove his mask as a wave of nausea surged up his gullet. He pulled the rebreather up just enough to expose his mouth – a practice every worker learned early on in the reclamation chambers – and puked a bloody froth of lung and stomach tissue. He spat a stringy mouthful of ash and glassy plasma residue and wiped his cracked lips with the back of his gloved hand.

  ‘Get a move on, Bondsman Locke,’ said Vresh, descending on his repulsor disc and tapping the base of his kinetic prod on his shoulder. ‘Don’t make me turn this on.’

  Abrehem almost preferred it when Vresh spoke in harsh bursts of machine code. At least then he didn’t have to listen to his grating authoritarian tones with comprehension. The overseer had eventually taken the hint that simply increasing the volume of his binaric code blurts didn’t make them any more intelligible to those without the capacity to translate them.

  Ironically, it was Crusha who had provided an insight into Vresh’s commands. The crude augmetics grafted to the ogryn’s powerful frame included a binaric slave coupler that had enough faded ident-codes left to tell Abrehem it had once been Guard issue. Crusha himself had no memory of his life before coming to the dockside bar, but its seemed likely he’d served in one of the abhuman cohorts attached to a Jouran regiment, perhaps as a lifter for an enginseer.

  Vresh had proved to be a vindictive overseer, a petty bureaucrat who revelled in his middling position of authority. He drove the bondsmen under his aegis hard, with a fondness for administering punishing blows from his kinetic prod and working them right up to the last minute before the giant plasma cylinders dumped their explosive waste material.

  ‘My lungs are on fire,’ said Abrehem, fighting for breath. ‘I can’t breathe.’

  ‘You have five seconds before I administer corrective encouragement.’

  Abrehem nodded, resigned to the pain, for he had no strength left to him. Some of the bondsmen who could go on no longer volunteered for surgical servitude, but Abrehem had long since vowed not to fall so low. Vresh hovered c
lose to him, the end of his kinetic prod buzzing with accumulating power.

  ‘Hey, no need for that,’ said Hawke, wading through drifts of sharp plasma flects with Crusha at his side. ‘We’ve got him. He’s fine.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s near the end of shift, no need to get nasty, eh?’ added Coyne.

  Crusha helped Abrehem to his feet, and he nodded gratefully to Hawke and Coyne as he read the shipboard timestamp in the code lines snaking in the depths of the walls. Fifty-five minutes remained of their shift. Abrehem was wondering how he was going to last that long, when he saw something that sent a jolt of adrenaline through his wretched, toxin-ravaged body.

  Angry, wounded blares of code light shimmered on the vaulted ceiling of the reclamation chamber, like a red weal on skin just before a needle punctures the vein. Vresh felt it too, and looked up in puzzlement as a glowing spot of light appeared on the surface of the chamber’s ceiling.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ asked Hawke, wiping a greasy hand over the eye-lenses of his rebreather.

  Abrehem read the frantic code in the walls as it burst apart in sprays of warning data, and saw the nature of the emergency above in its binary fear. Enslaved bondsmen throughout the chamber paused in their labours and looked up at the unnatural sight.

  ‘We have to get out,’ he gasped. ‘Right now.’

  ‘Why, what’s going on?’

  ‘The plasma combustion chamber above, it’s been breached,’ cried Abrehem, turning and running as quickly as he could in his environment suit to the sealed door to the chamber. ‘Everyone out! Run, for Thor’s sake run!’

  ‘Halt immediately,’ snapped Vresh. ‘Bondsman Locke, cease and desist all attempts to vacate this chamber. Continued disobedience will result in enforced surgical servitude.’

  Abrehem ignored the overseer and kept on going, stomping over the scoured deck where the industrial-scale sifters and brushes had already swept. He felt the eye-watering buzz of the prod as Vresh caught up to him, but didn’t have the energy to avoid it. The prod touched him in the centre of his back and a thunderous punch of kinetic force slammed him to the deck. The breath was driven from him by the impact, and he rolled onto his back as Hawke and Coyne rushed to his side.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Hawke.

  ‘We’ve got to get out,’ said Abrehem. ‘This place is going to be neck-deep in plasma any minute.’

  He struggled to get to his feet, each limb still jangling in pain with nerve stimulation from Vresh’s prod. The overseer floated down on his repulsor disc, and he aimed the throbbing staff at Abrehem’s chest.

  ‘Return to work, bondsmen,’ ordered Vresh. ‘Or the next prods will rip your nervous systems out through your skin.’

  Abrehem looked up as a tiny spot of light detached from the ceiling, falling in an almost lazy parabola that was just distorted perspective. The droplet of plasma fell with the accurate synchronicity of predestination, and Abrehem was not ashamed to later admit that he took great relish in what happened next.

  The droplet struck Vresh on the very top of his steel skull and cored through him like a high-powered laser. His body flash-burned from the marrow, and blue fire exploded from his augmetic eye-lenses and connective plugs. His bones fused in an instant and gobbets of charred flesh and implanted metal dropped to the deck with a wet thud of smoking remains.

  ‘Holy Terra!’ cried Coyne, backing away in horror from the ruin of what had, a moment ago, been a person.

  ‘What the hell...?’ spat Hawke.

  ‘Come on!’ said Abrehem. ‘We have to go. Now.’

  ‘No arguments from me,’ said Hawke, turning and sprinting for the reclamation chamber’s exit gate. Coyne was hard on his heels, with Crusha lumbering behind them. Abrehem followed them, struggling as the after-effects of the kinetic prod made his limbs stiff and jerky.

  The light above grew in brightness until it bathed the entire chamber in its bleached white glow. A spiderweb of glowing light spread from the initial leak, spreading ever wider as the structural integrity of the ceiling began to fail. More droplets of plasma fell from the ceiling like the beginnings of a gentle rain shower. But where these droplets landed they sparked into flames, rekindling the toxic waste dumped from the combustion chambers or igniting the oil-soaked environment suits of bondsmen.

  Stratified layers of volatile fumes, kept below the ignition threshold by overworked, chugging vents, suddenly expanded as hot plasma was added to the mix. Pockets of flammable gas exploded throughout the chamber as the illuminated cracks on the ceiling burned brighter and brighter.

  ‘Open the gate!’ shouted Abrehem as drizzles of white-hot plasma sheeted down behind them in a falling curtain of fire. The death screams of the bondsmen farther back were swallowed as the superheated air vaporised their rebreathers and sucked the breath from their lungs.

  ‘It’s bloody locked, isn’t it?’ said Hawke, looking over Abrehem’s shoulder as a portion of the ceiling collapsed and a deluge of plasma dropped into the chamber. ‘Only Vresh could open it.’

  ‘Not just Vresh,’ said Abrehem. ‘At least, I hope not.’

  He placed his hand on the arched gate and read the simple machine-spirit working the lock. Its sentience was barely worthy of the name, with a simple dual state of being. He followed the path of its workings, and sent a pulse of binary from his augmetic eyes. The lock resisted at first, unused to his identity and wary of a new touch, but it relented as he whispered the prayer his father had taught him as a young boy.

  ‘Thus do we invoke the Machine-God. Thus do we make whole that which was sundered.’

  The lock disengaged and the reinforced gate sank into the floor with a grinding rumble of slowly turning mechanisms. Hawke was first over when the gate had lowered enough, quickly followed by Crusha and Coyne. Abrehem leapt through as a roaring crash and a surge of dazzling brilliance told him that the entire ceiling had finally given way behind them.

  ‘Close it! Close it!’ yelled Coyne as a wave of roiling plasma surged towards the gateway.

  Abrehem placed his palm on the lock plate on the outside of the chamber.

  Again he looked deep into the heart of the gate’s lock spirit and said, ‘Machine, seal thyself.’

  The gateway rumbled back up with what seemed like agonising slowness, but it was fast enough to prevent the ocean of searing plasma from escaping the reclamation chamber. A jet of scalding steam and a layer of scorched iron spat through the top of the gate, but this barrier was designed to withstand excesses of temperature and pressure, and it held firm against the onslaught of sun-hot plasma within.

  Abrehem let out a shuddering breath and placed his head against the burning iron of the gate.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Hawke and Coyne held their sides and drew in gulping breaths of stagnant air.

  ‘Shitting hell, that was close,’ said Hawke, almost laughing in relief.

  ‘What just happened?’ demanded Coyne. ‘Are all those men in there dead?’

  ‘Of course they’re bloody dead,’ snapped Abrehem. ‘They’re nothing but vapour now.’

  ‘Emperor’s mercy,’ said Coyne, sinking to his knees and putting his head in his hands. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

  ‘You saved our lives in there, Abe,’ said Hawke, patting Abrehem on the back. ‘I reckon that’s gotta be worth something. What do you say I stand you boys a drink?’

  Abrehem nodded. ‘I could drink a whole barrel of your rotgut right about now.’

  ‘Let’s not get too carried away,’ said Hawke. ‘Only your first’s on the house.’

  ‘Plasmic temperature falling exponentially,’ said Magos Blaylock, and his attendant dwarfs clapped their foreshortened limbs as though he had been personally responsible for saving the ship. ‘Teslas are still high, but falling too. Plasma density diminishing rapidly and thermal kinetic energy per particle dro
pping off to non-destructive levels.’

  Kotov let out a stream of lingua-technis prayers and closed his eyes to give thanks for the reprieve.

  ‘God of All Machines, today you have judged your servants worthy of your Great Work,’ said Kotov, letting his voice carry over the entire command deck. ‘And for this we give thanks. Glory to the Omnissiah!’

  ‘Glory to the Omnissiah,’ intoned the assembled magi.

  ‘The living diminish,’ said Kotov.

  ‘But the Machine endures,’ came the traditional reply.

  Streams of worshipful binary bloomed from the floodstream of every magos as each of them began to take control of the damage that had been done to the ship. Kotov could feel its deep hurt, a bone-deep agony, like a mortal lance thrust to the back.

  But where lesser ships would die, the Ark Mechanicus would endure.

  Kotov let his mind skim the oscillating streams of light that travelled the length and breadth of the Speranza, drinking in the data flowing between its myriad systems. Every one of them felt pain, but every one of them siphoned the agony of system death from the most grievously wounded machines and took it into their own processes. Every part of the ship felt the pain of its wounding, but out of that shared agony came a lessening of the worst damage.

  Throughout the ship, Kotov felt the presences of the thousands of tech-priests, lexmechanics, calculus-logi, data-savants and sentience-level servitors that made up the Speranza’s crew. Every member of the Cult Mechanicus that could plug into the Manifold had done so, and each one sang binary hymns of quietude or recited catechisms of devotion and obeisance to the Machine. Individually, each might not achieve much, but the song of the Adeptus Mechanicus combined throughout the ship to ease the pain of its dreadful wound.