Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  ‘A thinking machine?’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Kotov, the idea abhorrent. ‘Simply a cogitating machine that could have its functions situationally enhanced with the addition of linked cerebral cortexes to its neuromatrix.’

  ‘So this is an element of that?’ said Hawkins.

  ‘In the same way that your hand is a part of you, Captain Hawkins, but it is not you. Nor is it aware on any level of the greater whole of which it is part. In truth, such machines are rare now; their employment fell out of favour many centuries ago.’

  ‘Why was that?’ asked Hawkins.

  ‘The machine’s artificial neuromatrix often developed a reluctance to allow the linked cortexes to disengage and diminish its capacity. The tech-priests could not be unplugged without causing them irreparable mental damage. And if left connected too long, the gestalt machine entity developed aberrant psychological behaviour patterns.’

  ‘You mean they went mad?’

  ‘A simplistic way of putting it, but in essence, yes.’

  ‘I’m thinking that’s the kind of information that might have been worth including in the briefing dockets for this mission,’ said Hawkins.

  Kotov shook his head. ‘There was no need. The Fabricator General issued a decree six hundred and fifty-six years ago stating that all such machines were to have their linking capacity deactivated. Only the most basic autonomic functions are permitted now.’

  ‘So if we get this door open, will it rouse the station from hibernation?’ asked the Reclusiarch.

  ‘That rather depends on how we open it,’ said Kotov, kneeling by the panel and sliding the shield to one side. A number of wires extended from his fingertips, inserting themselves into the sockets beside the keypad. Hawkins watched the archmagos at work, the fingers of his free hand dancing over the keypad, too fast to follow as he entered hundreds of numbers in an ever-expanding sequence.

  ‘It appears the central data engine is still dormant,’ said Kotov. ‘It will remain so unless we make a more direct interference with the Manifold station’s systems.’

  ‘Can you get us in or not?’ asked Sergeant Tanna, moving towards the door.

  Kotov withdrew his digital dendrites and stood back with a satisfied smile.

  ‘Welcome, Archmagos Lexell Kotov,’ said the static-fringed image of the silver-eyed tech-priest.

  A booming clang of heavy mag-locks disengaging sounded from deep inside the door, and it slid up into its housing. Dangling punch-card prayer strips attached to its base fluttered in the pressure differential, but it was clear there was atmosphere within the station. Stale and fusty, but breathable.

  The Reclusiarch was first through the door, the vast bulk of his Terminator armour forcing him to angle his body. Tanna and the rest of the Space Marines went in after him, followed by Kotov and his retinue of combat-enhanced warriors. Hawkins stepped into the station, feeling a shiver of cold travel the length of his spine as his boots clanged on the metal grille floor.

  The airlock vestibule was a vaulted antechamber with dulled stained-glass orison panels and hooded figures set within deep recesses in the bare metal walls; iron statues of tech-priests draped in icicles. A lumen-strip on the ceiling sparked and struggled to ignite, but succeeded only in flickering on and off at irregular intervals. Another pict screen burbled to life, and the familiar voice of the recorded tech-priest spoke once again.

  ‘Welcome aboard the Valette Manifold station, Archmagos Kotov. How can we assist you today?’

  ‘How does it know your name?’ said Hawkins.

  ‘I shed data like you shed skin,’ said Kotov. ‘Even a basic system like this can read my identity through my digital dendrites.’

  ‘Welcome aboard the Valette Manifold station, Archmagos Kotov,’ repeated the tech-priest. ‘How can we assist you today?’

  ‘I do not require your assistance,’ said Kotov.

  ‘Interrogative: do you require us to rouse the higher functions of the central data engine to facilitate your purpose in coming here?’

  Kul Gilad shook his head and placed a finger to the lipless mouth of his skull helm.

  ‘No,’ said Kotov. ‘That will not be necessary.’

  ‘As you wish, archmagos,’ said the crackling tech-priest before fading into the background static.

  The skitarii lit their helmet lamps. The stark illumination threw sharply-defined shadows onto walls that were slick with defrosting ice.

  ‘No one’s been here in a very long time,’ said Rae.

  ‘Eighty years, to be precise, Lieutenant Rae,’ said Kotov, moving on to the next door with Black Templars flanking him. Hawkins felt there was more to this emptiness than simply a lack of visitors; the station felt abandoned, like something broken and left to slowly decay. Droplets of moisture landed on his helmet, and slithered down his face. He wiped them away, and his hand came away streaked with black oil.

  He flicked the oil away and said, ‘Right, keep an eye on our rear. I want to make sure our exfiltration route isn’t compromised if we need to get out of here in a hurry. I’ll take Squad Creed, Rae, you take Kell. Watch your corners, check your sixes and keep a wary bloody eye out. I don’t like this place, and I get the feeling it doesn’t like us much either.’

  Hawkins turned and followed the bobbing lumens of the skitarii.

  The Manifold station’s schemata indicated that its construction took the form of a central hub reserved for power generation, with a main access corridor that travelled the circumference of the station. Numerous laboratories, libraries and living quarters branched off this central corridor, with levels above and below reserved for personal research spaces, astropathic chambers and maintenance workshops. The airlock they had breached was in the bulbous central section and the arched corridor beyond the airlock led them out onto the main access route around the station.

  Six metres wide, with an arched ceiling and walls of black iron stamped with numerical codes and images of the cog-rimmed skull, it curved left and right into darkness. Hawkins spread his men against the walls, keeping his rifle and his eyes matched as they scanned the empty corridor. The only illumination came from the skitarii’s suit lamps and the fading glow-globes hanging on slender cabling. The lights swayed gently in the freshly disturbed air, and the sound of distantly moving metal sighed along the corridor like far-off moaning.

  A broken pict screen came to life on the wall. The silver-eyed tech-priest jumped and squalled through the static.

  ‘Magos Kotov, may we assist you in navigating the Valette Manifold station?’

  ‘Can you shut that damn thing up?’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Until we know what we’re dealing with, I don’t want to attract any more attention than necessary from this station’s systems.’

  Kotov nodded and bent to expose a maintenance panel beneath the pict screen. His digital dendrites writhed into the mass of winking lights, wires and exposed copper connectors.

  ‘Magos Kotov, may we assist you in navigating the Valette Manifold station?’ repeated the voice.

  ‘No, and you are not to offer assistance again unless I specifically request it,’ said Kotov, sealing the maintenance hatch behind him. The pict screen went dark and Hawkins was thankful to see it power down. Each time a screen came to life, it felt like the station was watching them.

  ‘This way,’ said Kotov, gesturing to the left. ‘In a hundred metres, there will be a set of access stairs that will allow us to ascend to the upper levels and the control deck.’

  Kul Gilad nodded and moved on with the Emperor’s Champion on his left and Sergeant Tanna on his right. Leaving Rae’s men to secure the airlock vestibule, Hawkins led his squad after the Space Marines, alert for any signs of something amiss. Even through his padded environment suit, the hard air of the station seemed to leach the warmth from his bones. Shadows moved strangely and the light reflected harshly
from frost-limned wall panels. Hawkins didn’t like this place, and his Cadian instincts were telling him that something was very wrong.

  He glanced over at a blank pict screen, its glass crazed by a powerful impact.

  The screen flickered to life and Hawkins almost yelled in surprise, bringing his rifle around as battlefield-honed reflexes took over. He managed not to pull the trigger, and let out a shuddering breath as adrenaline dumped into his system.

  The silver-eyed tech-priest stared at him, but didn’t say anything.

  Kotov appeared at Hawkins’s side, kneeling before this screen’s maintenance panel.

  ‘What did you do?’ demanded the archmagos.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Hawkins. ‘It just came on by itself.’

  ‘Did it say anything?’

  Hawkins shook his head, and once again the archmagos deactivated the pict screen. In the silence that followed, Hawkins heard a squeal of metal from farther around the corridor. Before the sound had a chance to echo, seven Space Marine bolt weapons were instantly trained into the darkness.

  ‘Douse those lights!’ ordered Kul Gilad, and instantly the skitarii’s lamps were snuffed out.

  ‘Defensive posture,’ ordered Hawkins, shouldering his rifle as he dropped to one knee. ‘Squad Creed, watch ahead. Guardsman Manos, look for anything coming up behind us.’

  The sounds came again, a thudding iron footfall and a scrape of metal on metal. Hawkins flipped down his helmet’s visor and the hallway before him was suddenly splashed in a haze of emerald light, with his rifle’s targeting reticule painting a bright smear on the curved wall ahead of him. A phantom shadow was thrown out on the deck. Something was approaching from deeper within the station. He slipped his finger around his rifle’s trigger as a shape emerged slowly from around the arcing corridor.

  The figure was broad-shouldered and moved with a lurching groan of protesting servos. Its breathing was frothed and heavy, like a labouring beast of burden. Hawkins let the air out of his lungs as he saw an augmented servitor, dragging a mangled leg behind it. A sparking arm swung in a repeating circular motion. He eased his trigger finger free.

  ‘It’s just a servitor,’ said Kotov. ‘Stand your men down, Reclusiarch.’

  The guns of the Black Templars didn’t waver a millimetre, and Hawkins wasn’t about to lower his rifle until they did. He kept the aiming reticule centred over the servitor’s skull, a thick hunk of bone and flesh that seemed to squat on the servitor’s shoulders without a neck. It was hard to make out much detail through the blurred nightsight visor, but there seemed to be something fundamentally wrong with the proportions of the servitor’s skull.

  ‘Put it down, Tanna,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘No!’ cried Kotov, but the ignition of a bolter shell filled the corridor with noise as Tanna’s round blew the top of the servitor’s skull clear, leaving only a sloshing, blood-filled basin of pulped brain matter. The cybernetic took half a dozen more steps before its stunted physiology finally accepted that it was dead and it collapsed to the deck. Its sparking leg twitched and spasmed, still trying to move its body forwards, and the oversized arm fizzed and whined as it attempted to recreate the motions it had been making while its bearer was upright.

  Kotov and his skitarii swept down the corridor towards the downed servitor.

  ‘Do not approach it, archmagos,’ warned Kul Gilad.

  ‘Your sergeant killed it, Reclusiarch,’ snapped Kotov. ‘Servitors may be physically resistant and feel no pain, but even they struggle to be a threat without a head.’

  ‘That’s not a servitor,’ said Kul Gilad.

  Hawkins waved two of his men to come forwards with him, following the Black Templars as they escorted Archmagos Kotov towards the downed servitor.

  ‘Omnissiah’s bones,’ hissed Kotov, making a penitent symbol of the Cog Mechanicus over his chest. ‘What has happened here?’

  At first, Hawkins wasn’t sure why Kotov was reacting so badly, but then he saw the shreds of skin that flapped loose on the remains of the servitor’s skull. Kul Gilad knelt beside the creature and took hold of a wide strip of waxen skin. He peeled it back, revealing muscle, sinew and organic tissue, exactly as would be expected

  But Hawkins’s eyes widened as he finally grasped the nature of the creature’s physiognomy; the jutting lower jaw and protruding tusks, the battered porcine snout. Hawkins had to fight the ingrained urge to draw his pistol and put a pair of bolt rounds in its chest to make sure it was dead.

  The servitor was an ork.

  Flensed of its green hide and clothed in a sutured sheath of human skin, but still recognisably a greenskin marauder.

  Kotov knelt beside the ork and placed a hand on its mechanised parts. Writhing nests of cables extruded from each of his hands and fixed themselves to its augmetic leg and arm.

  ‘God of All Machines, in the name of the Originator, the Scion and the Motive Force, release these spirits from the blasphemy into which they have been bound. Free them to fly the golden light to your care, and renew them in your all-knowing wisdom to return to us. In your mercy, make it so.’

  ‘What was that?’ snarled Tanna. ‘You feel pity for this thing?’

  ‘For the machines grafted to this unclean monster’s flesh,’ said Kotov, turning and nodding to one of the skitarii, who drew a set of cutting tools from his utility pack and bent to the grisly task of removing the machine parts from the ork’s body.

  ‘I’m guessing it’s not normal to make servitors from greenskins,’ said Hawkins, watching as the skitarii fired up up a shielded plasma-cutter and began stripping back the flesh around the graft. A fungal stink of rotten vegetable matter and scorched skin filled the corridor. Hawkins felt himself gag through the filter of his rebreather.

  ‘What has been happening here, archmagos?’ demanded Kul Gilad.

  ‘Trust me, Reclusiarch, I would know that too,’ said Kotov. ‘It is an abomination to graft blessed machines to such non-human savages.’

  Hawkins heard the distant rumble of something powerful coming to life deep within the station. Lights flickered on along the curve of the walls and a hum of activating machinery rose from beneath the metal grilles of the deck plates.

  ‘I think the station’s waking up,’ he said.

  ‘This creature’s destruction has alerted the system core to our presence,’ agreed Kotov. ‘We should proceed with all speed to the central command deck. The station may now perceive us as attackers.’

  As if to ram that point home, an armoured blast containment shutter hammered down behind them, cutting off the route back to the airlock vestibule. Dull thuds of metal slamming together told Hawkins that a number of similar shutters were sealing off entire areas of the station from one another. Instantly, Hawkins’s ear filled with squalling bursts of shrieking static, and he wrenched the vox-bead out with a grunt of pain.

  ‘Vox is down,’ he called.

  ‘Prepare for battle,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Kotov, open that shutter. I’ll not be cut off from the Barisan.’

  Kotov shook his head. ‘The core systems are reviving, Reclusiarch. Only the ranking magos has authority to override the blast containment system.’

  ‘You are an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ snarled Kul Gilad, pushing Kotov towards the blast shutter. ‘Assert your authority and get that door open.’

  Before Kotov could move, another pair of pict screens fuzzed to life, each bearing the image of the tech-priest with the silver optics. A gabble of binaric anger spat from them, and the mirror images of the tech-priest looked up, the gleaming light of their optics narrowing to focused points.

  ‘You have attacked our servants,’ said the tech-priest, shaking his head in disappointment. ‘We cannot allow that while we still have need of them.’

  ‘That’s not a recording, is it?’ said Hawkins.

  ‘No,’ replied Kotov. ‘
I do not believe it is.’

  In the lower reaches of the Manifold station, a thermal generator spooled up with an ultra-rapid start cycle, utilising a series of linked machines that encircled the station’s inner circumference. Each of these linked machines had been developed from technology designed to rouse the plasma reactors of battle Titans to full readiness in the shortest time possible. An almost complete STC discovered by Magos Phlogiston less than half a millennium ago had described the construction of such ‘kick-starters’, but its missing fragments had contained the information required to prevent such devices from driving their reactors into uncontrolled critical mass in a matter of seconds. Thus the designs were archived instead of being put into production.

  The Valette kick-starters bore all the hallmarks of Phlogiston’s recovered STC, but were fitted with a series of inhibitors built to a design that no analyticae would find in any forge world’s data repositories or even the most comprehensive databases of Olympus Mons. Only one son of Mars had the nous to craft such devices, and he had destroyed every trace of their design before leaving the bounds of galactic space.

  Within ninety seconds of Tanna’s bolter shot, the power systems for the Valette Manifold station were operating at full efficiency. The fierce thermal reserve coursed around the upper and lower reaches of the station with virtually no heat loss via a series of ultra-insulated pipes that threaded the walls, floors and ceilings like a circulatory system.

  In vaulted chambers where the skeleton crew of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests and servitors had once toiled in service to the Machine-God, power now flowed for a very different purpose. In every laboratory, library and workshop, the temperatures within three hundred fluid-filled cryo-caskets rose as their occupants were roused from deep slumber. Controlled current fired through augmented synapses, warmed super-efficient blood pumped through flexing veins, and stimulated stratified layers of deep muscle tissue.

  Billowing clouds of chill air sighed from the three hundred caskets as icy fluid was drained and vented from their upper tiers in freezing crystalline jets. Glass doors opened and dripping figures encased in webs of copper cabling and plastic tubes took their first natural breaths in fifty years.