Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  Thus armed, Hydraq continued onwards.

  Archmagos Alhazen ran an efficient forge-temple. The mag-lev transits ran to a precise timetable and the ingress/egress patterns of adepts, servitors and the thousands of robed tech-priests were regulated to exacting standards.

  Hydraq was the only one not following its prescribed flow.

  His unauthorised movement had been registered, as had his unsanctioned entrance to the datacore complex. Three squads of Mechanicus Protectors were already mobilising to intercept.

  All things being equal, Hydraq had four minutes until they reached him.

  But all things were not equal.

  Hydraq had just penetrated the deepest level of the datacore complex when Forge Basiri went dark.

  Power failures on Mars were uncommon, but even so, each forge possessed numerous backup systems to immediately take over if the power was ever lost.

  In theory, a complete loss of power was impossible.

  Unless someone with senior enough prefix-codes had disabled those backup systems.

  Hydraq could picture the chaos above, tens of thousands of adepts, info-sentinels and calculus-logi scrambling to save the precious data in their systems before internal capacitors drained completely.

  Every soul in service to Archmagos Alhazen, including the Mechanicus Protectors, would be bound by emergency protocols. A single adept was the least of their worries.

  How wrong they were.

  Hydraq followed a curving corridor in total darkness towards the entrance to the most secure vault in Forge Basiri. Had the power been operational, a dozen security systems would already have halted his progress, shot him down or otherwise ended his infiltration.

  The corridor made an abrupt turn, and Hydraq found himself in a high-roofed chamber of incredible dimensions. At its exact centre was an obsidian cube fifteen metres square and enclosed within a latticed steel framework.

  Squatting before the caged cube were two Praetorian-grade servitors. Bloated with combat augmetics, lethal weaponry and advanced battle-wetware, they were monsters in all but name.

  Praetorians were capable of semi-autonomous engagement, but the blackout had isolated them from the combat grid. To their eyes, Hydraq was a native of Forge Basiri. He didn’t give them a chance to realise their mistake and vaporised both their skulls with twin shots from the melta pistols.

  The weaponised servitors collapsed in hulking piles of liquified metal and bubbling flesh. Hydraq moved past their corpses to the cube over which they had stood guard.

  ‘A data-tight Faraday Cage,’ he said in admiration.

  The way in was a simple door of plated steel secured with a heavy padlock. Protection so absurdly primitive that it seemed ridiculous, but it was all that separated Hydraq from Archmagos Alhazen’s most precious secret.

  That very primitivity was what had required a physical intervention. Data connected to a network was inherently vulnerable to remote attack, but this datacore was completely isolated. And on a planet where every single system shared a link somewhere, only data kept completely off the Martian networks could be considered secure.

  Hydraq’s presence here refuted that belief.

  He blasted the lock from the door and kicked it inwards.

  Inside, the cube was empty save for a single, gloss-black cogitator that drew its power from battery racks secured in recessed alcoves.

  Mono-tasked servitors tended to the batteries, and they ignored him as he circled the cogitator. Three metres tall, smooth-faced and featureless. A black monolith to knowledge, like something erected by a race of celestial engineers.

  At its midpoint was a single inload/exload port and Hydraq unfurled Adept Duqu’s mechadendrite, rotating its end cap to a data-spike. Duqu’s slack features were reflected in the mirror surface of the cogitator and Hydraq shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, my friend, this is the end for you. I need your memory space.’

  He felt Duqu’s panic, but didn’t let that stop him erasing every aspect of the hijacked adept’s persona from his own memory coils. In a single act of murderous reformatting, Hydraq reduced Adept Duqu’s body to a mindless meat puppet.

  No loose ends.

  He slotted home the data-spike and allowed a small smile to surface as the exload began. Binary scrolled past his eyes in dense, interleaved streams.

  ‘You keep a great many secrets, archmagos,’ said Hydraq, checking the aircraft he’d authorised earlier was prepped on its launch platform. It was, and he grinned, browsing the data as it poured from the cogitator. Even freed from the necessity of storing Adept Duqu’s personality matrices, the memory coils were quickly approaching capacity.

  He kept a search trawl running in the background, hunting for signs of the Cartographae 20-30, but the more he searched the more his unease grew.

  ‘It’s not here,’ he said, his unease turning to a sick, gut-loosening horror at what was. He wanted to disconnect, to wrench the spike from the inload slot. But this was too big, too damning, the implications too horrifying not to know.

  At last the exload was complete.

  He stepped back from the cogitator, wishing he’d never set foot in this forge, never taken Enaric’s commission and never touched knowledge he couldn’t forget.

  ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ whispered Hydraq.

  ‘Not what you were expecting, was it?’ said a black-robed adept stepping from the shadows.

  Aurora watched the storm break over the crater’s edge via a swarm of remote spy-flies on the surface. They’d built the camp securely enough not to worry about the dust fouling anything, but the sight of the approaching storm-front gave her a shiver of premonition.

  She wished they hadn’t taken his commission. Enaric’s job had smelled bad from the start. But she was bound to Hydraq, and some debts could never be settled, the scales too weighted with blood to ever balance.

  Where he went she went, and he went where trouble lay.

  She blinked away the view from outside and brought the mission countdown to the front of her eye.

  ‘Too long,’ she muttered, looking down at Hydraq’s prone body on the grav-couch. It would be days before he’d walk properly after this job, his limbs bruised and twisted by the convulsions of the Red Static. He’d heal, like he always did, gripped by narcotic dreams and fighting the hunger for more.

  A perverse way to live when there were a dozen augments he could implant to purge his renal system.

  Hydraq’s face was lined and pale, his eyes darting behind their closed lids. His skin, never a heathy shade, was ashen, like a corpse. She knew what would happen if the body hosting his mind died, but pushed the image aside.

  All too easy for one such as her to imagine the myriad ways a body could die. Wasting away with a consciousness lost forever in digital limbo, a flesh cut off from return. No way for a warrior to die.

  She pushed herself to her feet and made her way to where the flesh-spare Simocatta reclined on his delicate framework, a dozen entoptic screens hanging in the air around him. Some were data trawls from the reactors he’d compromised with the Night Dragon, others were passive feeds from orbitals he’d redirected to look down on Forge Basiri.

  ‘Have you heard from him?’

  Simocatta looked up from his screens and a toothy grin split his sweating face.

  ‘No, my dear Aurora,’ he said, unctuous to a fault. ‘Our mutual friend is still at work.’

  ‘The feed? It’s still active?’

  Simocatta indicated his cogitator, its surface blinking with green lights across the board.

  ‘Adept Duqu still dances merrily to Hydraq’s tune, though I suspect his dalliance must end soon.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I estimate Forge Basiri will have its power restored within forty seconds. If Adept Hydraq is not on his way out by then, he won’t be coming out
at all.’

  ‘Don’t call him that,’ said Aurora.

  ‘He keeps saying that too,’ mused Simocatta, wagging a slender finger at her. ‘Why is that? What grudge does he hold against the Cult Mechanicus or they against him? I confess I cannot find any record of him in the Martian datascape, which is both disquieting and reassuring in equal measure.’

  ‘Did you really think you would find him?’

  Simocatta laughed. ‘I suppose not.’

  Aurora saw the panel before Simocatta flicker with a mixture of red and amber lights.

  ‘Is that him?’

  Simocatta nodded, and flicked a series of ivory-capped switches on the panel next to him. Half the screens vanished.

  ‘It is indeed,’ said Simocatta, twisting a black dial and bringing up an auspex feed from an orbital plate. ‘I am detecting a fast-moving flyer leaving a southern platform to us as we speak.’

  ‘Time for us both to get to work,’ said Aurora, galvanised and relieved at Hydraq’s exit from Forge Basiri. ‘You know what to do?’

  ‘Of course. Call back the Night Dragon from all but the reactor in the Pollack Crater.’

  Aurora nodded. ‘As soon as Alhazen realises what’s happened, he’ll send everything he’s got after us. We’ll need some cover.’

  Simocatta rubbed his hands together. ‘Trust me, Mistress Aurora, when that reactor goes critical, no-one will be tracking anything within tens of thousands of kilometres for a rather long time.’

  Aurora made her way up top, into the wind-scoured camp where visibility was down to less than ten metres. Red dust filled the crater and the trench was ankle-deep in the stuff. Her bodyglove felt clogged with it.

  The prefabbed shelters rocked with the force of the wind ramming through the crater. The neurosurgical-pod wasn’t moving, secured by stabilising struts bolted to the rock and protected by hurricane dampers. As far as the chirurgeons could feel, the environment beyond their hermetically-sealed walls was utterly calm. Aurora transmitted a ready code to the chirurgical leader, receiving a terse acknowledgement in reply.

  She dropped and rolled beneath the pod, detaching two blocks of explosives from her belt. Neither was larger than the magazine of a pistol, but they would obliterate the pod and the team within once Hydraq and Aurora had what they needed.

  With the neurosurgical pod rigged, Aurora moved past the sunken shelters where the earth-movers were being slowly buried by the sand.

  The third shelter was covered by a billowing cameleoline tarpaulin that strained in the growing winds. Where the sand was swallowing the earth-movers, this shelter was kept proof against the Martian storms by virtue of an integral electrostatic shield generator.

  She moved around its edge, ripping out the clips holding the tarp in place. The wind seized it and tore it away, revealing a tapered, gull-winged craft with a sleek deadly profile. It was a thing of beauty, a needle-tail Merganser, its gloss-black hull formed from a single-cast of polycarbonate resin that was virtually invisible to augurs.

  Aurora dropped into the shelter, feeling the electrostatic shield scrape the dust from her as she passed through it. She landed by the cockpit, and twin bull head emblems shimmered on the wings, visible only because the flyer now recognised her.

  ‘Time to fly, my pretty,’ she said, and the drive plant purred to life. Near silent, but more powerful than any other two-man flyer in the Martian registries.

  Aurora placed her hands next to the frontal cockpit and soft light haloed her splayed fingers. With deft movements of her fingertips, she prepped the flyer for evac, warming the avionics and setting up false flags for their flight path.

  The Merganser was as ready as it ever would be. All it needed now were passengers.

  ‘Mistress Aurora?’ said a voice in her vox-bead.

  ‘What is it, Simocatta?’

  ‘I should close my eyes about now.’

  Knowing what was coming, Aurora crouched low and cut the feed to her optics as the shelter was lit from above by a blinding flash of searing light.

  The atomic explosion of the Pollack Reactor lit the sky for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. It filled the atmosphere with radioactive fallout and made Sinus Sabeus lousy with e-mag storms.

  Aurora vaulted from the shelter seeing the hazed, fiery outline of a towering mushroom cloud on the northern horizon. A storm was coming for sure, one that was only going to get worse.

  She made her way back to the underground bunker and passed through the ultrasonic scrubbers, grabbing Hydraq’s wrath-pattern pistol. The gunbelt snapped easily around her waist as she entered the infocytes chamber. They were just as she’d left them, flat on their bellies and still connected to the enormous data trunking.

  A burst of paralysing code kept them from looking up as she drew her short-bladed stabbing swords. Aurora somersaulted into the pit they’d dug and drove a blade through the back of each skull.

  Aurora wiped her blades clean and slotted them home in their scabbards. She left the chamber, moving swiftly to where the data-miners sifted the noosphere and physical networks.

  Six of them looked up, their eyes glazed with partial connection, and killed them where they sat. Six needle rounds right through the eyes. With each death, a connection faded to black.

  Aurora holstered her pistols and moved past Hydraq’s chamber to where Simocatta was struggling from his reinforced framework of a seat. His face was a ruddy mask of fear. He’d felt the infocytes and data-miners die.

  He knew he was next.

  ‘Mistress Aurora!’ he cried. ‘Please! What are you doing?’

  ‘No loose ends,’ she said, and shot Simocatta through the heart with a blue-white beam of plasma. Hydraq’s wrath-pattern was a duellist’s weapon. Single shot only, but a Cydonian Sister only needed one.

  Simocatta collapsed, dragging down his framework chair and smashing the cogitator in his fall. The entoptic screens tilted crazily, blizzardy with static. He reached for her, his fingers clawing the air, but his face was already turning blue from massive organ destruction and imminent brain-death.

  Aurora turned from the room and overlaid one eye with what her spy-flies were seeing. A workhorse Ares-pattern lander burst through the clouds, rocking and swaying in the atomic winds and roaring from the detonation of the Pollack Reactor’s core.

  ‘Erratic,’ she said of its flight profile. ‘He’s hurt.’

  The Ares set down on the area they’d designated as the landing zone. Its engines coughed and died, clogged with radioactive dust. She zoomed in on the pilot’s canopy, but the storm made it impossible to make out more than a blurred impression of a man’s outline.

  Aurora heard a strangled cry from Hydraq’s chamber.

  She holstered the wrath-pattern and found him struggling against his restraints. His eyes were wide with terror, sweat pouring from him in rivers. She unsnapped him from the grav-couch and he all but launched himself to his feet.

  He would have fallen but for her arms, his body and brain not yet aligned with one another.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ he said. ‘Now!’

  She dragged him through the bunker, his abused body still trying to overcome connection burn and the bruising he’d sustained in hijacking Duqu. His skin was ashen, yet fever-hot, his breathing shallow.

  ‘You need to calm yourself,’ she said.

  He shook his head and took a gulp of air.

  ‘Got to go. Got to get away.’

  He looked up in desperation. ‘Your speeder?’

  ‘Prepped and waiting,’ she said. ‘Do we need to make that sharp exit now?’

  He nodded, too drained to speak.

  They scrambled out into the trench, the storm winds filling the air with choking particulates. Hydraq pressed his shemagh against his face as Aurora’s spy-flies saw the canopy of the Ares lift and a compact f
igure of a man emerge. He climbed down with precise movements, almost as though the storm winds didn’t trouble him at all.

  Anyone who could move like that worried her.

  ‘Who’s on that flyer?’ asked Aurora.

  Hydraq opened his mouth to speak, his brow knitting together in confusion. Grit made his eyes tear up.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

  ‘How can you not remember?’ asked Aurora as she hauled him out of the trench. He shook his head again, clearly just as much in the dark as she was.

  The winds were gathering strength. Every single tarp had blown away and the walls of the trenches were collapsing inwards. Only the neurosurgical pod resisted the atomic storm, but Aurora knew they had no need for it now. The mission was over. Whoever had gotten out of the Ares almost certainly wasn’t Duqu.

  With a pulse of thought she detonated the explosives and the surgical pod went up in a hard bang of white hot flames, gutted from the inside out by the twin plasmic/melta charges. If nothing else it might give them some cover or distract the new arrival long enough for them to escape.

  ‘Thank the Omnissiah…’ said Hydraq as the Merganser rose smoothly from its shelter, turning on its axis to face them.

  ‘That’s not me,’ said Aurora, more angry than surprised as the force of the storm was cut off by the electrostatic shield extending from the speeder’s hull.

  ‘No, that would be me,’ said a voice in her ear, so clear it was as if the speaker was right behind her.

  Which he was.

  Aurora dropped Hydraq and spun on her heel, both pistols leaping to her hands via their e-mag link. They flew past her outstretched grip and into the hands of a black-robed adept with his hood drawn back and piled across his shoulders.

  ‘I think I’ll take those,’ he said.

  She didn’t answer, her hands flashing for her blades as she sent a blur of hostile code at this adept. He didn’t so much as flinch, and her horror was complete when her own body locked in place, the attack turned back on her.