Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  Coyne pushed open the flimsy door to the latrines and was immediately flung back as a shock maul slammed into the side of his head. He dropped, poleaxed, to the ground. Abrehem skidded to a halt and tried to reverse his course. A crackling baton swung at his head, but he ducked and ran back the way he’d come. He heard the metallic cough of a shotgun blast and pain exploded in his lower back as his legs went numb under him. Abrehem crashed to the floor again, feeling twitching spasms of pain shooting up and down his spine.

  Mesh-gauntleted hands hauled him upright and he was dragged through the shattered remains of the bar, with its former clientele pleading, threatening and bargaining with the collarmen. Abrehem tried to struggle, but was held fast. Once the collarmen had you, that was it, you were bound to life aboard a starship, but that didn’t stop him from trying to beg for his freedom.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You can’t... I have... permits. I work! I have a wife!’

  He blinked away static interference as they dragged him outside, the discordant wail of the sirens making him feel sick and the constant barking of the cyber-hounds setting his teeth on edge. The collarmen dumped him at the open doors of the growling volunteer-wagon, and fresh hands hauled him upright. His legs were still weak, but he was able to stand as a clicking bio-optic was shone in his eyes and overloaded his filters.

  ‘Exosomatic augmetics,’ said a voice, surprise evident even muffled by a vox-grille.

  ‘Tertiary grade,’ said another. ‘We can pull a full bio-ident and service history off them.’

  ‘Got it. Loader-technician Abrehem Locke, assigned to Lifter Rig Savickas.’

  ‘A lifter-tech with tertiary grade augmetics? Got to be black market.’

  ‘Or stolen.’

  ‘They’re not stolen,’ gasped Abrehem as his filters recalibrated. Three men in glossy black armour stood before him. Two held him upright. Another consulted a data-slate. ‘They were my father’s.’

  ‘He was bonded?’ demanded a fourth voice, heavily augmented by vox-amplification.

  Abrehem turned to see a magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, swathed in hooded crimson vestments, only the hot coals of a tripartite optic visible in the shadows. A black and gold stole with cog-toothed edges and a host of blurred numbers hung from his neck, and a heavy generator pack was fixed to his back. A haze of chill air gusted from its vents like breath, causing a patina of frost to form on the nearest collarman’s armour.

  ‘Yes, to Magos Xurgis of the 734th Jouran Manufactory Echelons.’

  ‘Then you might be useful. Bring him and do not damage his optics,’ said the magos, turning away and moving on down the ragged line of collared men and women, floating on a shimmering cushion of repulsor fields.

  ‘No, please! Don’t!’ he cried, but the men holding him gave his pleas no mind. A bulked-out servitor with piston-driven musculature hauled him inside the iron-hulled vehicle, where at least thirty other men were shackled in various states of disarray. Abrehem saw Coyne and Ismael trussed like livestock ready for slaughter. The ogryn sat with its back resting against the interior of the confinement compartment with a bemused smile on its face, as though this were a mild diversion from its daily routine instead of a life-changing moment of horror.

  ‘No!’ he screamed as the steel doors slammed shut, leaving them sealed in dim, red-lit darkness.

  Abrehem wept as he felt the engine roar and the heavy vehicle moved off. He kicked out at the doors, almost breaking bone as he slammed his heels into the metalwork again and again.

  ‘Won’t do you any good,’ said a voice behind him.

  Abrehem turned angrily to see the man who’d threatened Ismael with the knife. He no longer had his weapon, and his hands were bound before him with plastek cuffs. Like the ogryn, he seemed unnaturally calm, and Abrehem hated him for that.

  ‘Where are they taking us?’ he said.

  ‘Where do you think? To the embarkation platforms. We’ve been collared and we’re on our way to the bowels of a starship to shovel fuel, haul ammunition crates or some other shitty detail until we’re dead or crippled.’

  ‘You sound pretty calm about it.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I reckon it’s my lot in life to get shit on from on high. I think the Emperor has a very sick sense of humour when it comes to my life. He puts me through the worst experiences a man could have, but keeps me alive. And for what? So I can go through more shit? Damn, but I wish He’d have done with me.’

  Abrehem heard the depths of the man’s anguish and an echo of something so awful that it didn’t bear thinking about. It sounded like the truth.

  ‘Those things you told the regimental commanders really happened, didn’t they?’ said Abrehem.

  The man nodded.

  ‘And all that stuff on Hydra Cordatus? It was all true?’

  ‘Yeah, I told the truth. For all the good it did me,’ said the man, holding out a cuffed hand to Abrehem. ‘Guardsman Julius Hawke. Welcome to the shit.’

  A pair of intricate four-dimensional maps of the southern reaches of Segmentum Pacificus hung suspended above the hololith projector. The Renard’s crew quarters did not possess such technology, so Magos Cartographae Vitali Tychon had brought one from his observatory on Quatria. Ghostly star systems spun in a dance that looked random, but which was as carefully plotted and arranged as the most perfectly formed binaric cant.

  Tychon’s myriad eyes saw divine beauty in the celestial geography, but amid the shimmering representation of the southern stars, a blighted, ugly wound burned at the edge of known space like a raw lasburn.

  The Halo Scar, a benighted region of hostile space that swallowed ships and defeated every attempt to penetrate its void-dark emptiness. No one knew what lay beyond the Scar, and the last Mechanicus fleet to have dared to enter its depths in search of knowledge had vanished from the galaxy thousands of year ago. Telok the Machine-touched had led his doomed fleet into the Halo Scar, seeking the answers to what he described as the greatest mystery of the universe. None of his ships had returned.

  Until now.

  Noospheric tags flickered and died like sparks as Tychon’s multiple eyes scrolled through a hundred star systems a second. He sought an answer to the conundrum that had compelled him to accept Archmagos Kotov’s offer of a place in his Expeditionary Fleet.

  He knew every speck of light and every hazed nebula on the first map, for he had compiled it himself, a little over five centuries ago.

  Ah, but the second map...

  To an outside observer, even a gifted stellar cartographer, there might appear to be no difference between the two maps. Yet to Tychon the second map might as well have represented the mutant wolf stars that leered in the tortured space around the Maelstrom. The second map’s structure was an agglomeration of thousands upon thousands of compiled celestial measurements from all across the segmentum, crude by comparison to the subtleties of his own measurements, but sufficiently accurate to cause him concern.

  Clicking mechanical fingers, ten on each hand, spun the globe of stars and systems, zooming in with haptic familiarity. Tychon read the various wavelength spectra, pulse intervals and radiation outputs of stars that had aged hundreds of thousands of years, in celestial terms, overnight.

  He let out a machine breath, amused at the holdover from when he had possessed organic lungs.

  ‘You know you won’t see anything new in those maps just by staring at them, don’t you?’ asked Linya, without looking up from her writing. His daughter sat at a battered wooden desk Captain Surcouf had procured for her from a fusty storage chamber in the dripping cloisters that flanked the engine spaces. The old wood smelled of contaminated oil, cheap engine lubricants and a mixture of chlorine from the purifiers and carbon dioxide from the atmospheric scrubbers. The aroma was unpleasant, and while Vitali could filter it out, Linya had no such recourse. She didn’t seem to mind, and had in fact relished the
chance to work at a desk of organic material and not a bench of cold steel for a change.

  ‘I know that, daughter dearest, but it tasks me,’ said Vitali, using his flesh voice. Though his vocal chords had long since atrophied, Linya had insisted he replace them with vat-grown replacements. Of course she had the capacity to comprehend and communicate in binaric cant, as well as the most complex devotional liturgies of lingua-technis, but chose to express herself with the imperfect and imprecise language of the unenlightened.

  ‘And it will still task you tomorrow, and the day after,’ said Linya, finally looking up from her books. Unlike her father, Linya was still – outwardly – largely organic. She wore the red of the Priesthood – as was her right as a member of the Cult Mechanicus – but there the similarities to most adepts of Mars ended. Long dark hair spilled around her shoulders, and the skin of her face was smooth and finely boned. Her features were those of her father, which was only to be expected, though an anomaly in the reproduction process had resulted in a spontaneous reversal of the sex he had chosen for his successor.

  A great deal of Linya’s internal biological architecture had been upgraded over the years, but she stubbornly clung to her original human form and the archaic ways of her forebears. The book in which she wrote was composed of pressed plant material and the instrument by which she recorded her thoughts and experimental observations was a simple plastek tube filled with liquid pigment.

  Linya’s refusal to follow convention was a source of irritation to her fellow tech-priests, and a source of great pleasure to Vitali.

  ‘I have no doubt it will,’ said Vitali, ‘but when one recalls scientific discoveries, it is always with a degree of fiction. We recall the “Eureka!” moment, and forget the decades of study, false starts and disproved hypotheses along the road to enlightenment. How many adepts failed in their researches before the one we remember came upon the truth by learning from their mistakes?’

  ‘You’re talking about Magos Mojaro again, aren’t you?’

  ‘A man may die yet still endure if his work enters the greater work, for time is carried upon a current of forgotten deeds, and events of great moment are but the culmination of a single carefully placed thought,’ said Vitali, reciting the ancient words of wisdom as though they were his own. ‘As all men must thank progenitors obscured by the past, so we must endure the present so that those who follow may continue the endeavour.’

  ‘Yes, he was an example to us all, father, but that won’t give you any insight into the changes in those maps. The data parity of the macroscope inloads is too scattered to be usable and the information brought back to the galleries is all third-hand at best. We’ll need to get out to the Halo Scar before we can gather anything concrete.’

  She paused before continuing, and Vitali knew what she was going to say, because she had said it so many times before.

  ‘You know we didn’t have to come on this mission? After all, even if we do emerge on the other side of the Scar, there’s no knowing if we’ll come back. The last explorators to travel beyond the Scar were declared lost over three thousand years ago. Even if Captain Surcouf does have a genuine relic of Telok’s lost fleet, what’s to say we won’t suffer the same fate?’

  She sighed, attempting a different tack. ‘Perhaps it’s just some facet of the Scar’s existence that’s altering the readings we’re taking?’

  ‘Do you really believe I haven’t considered that?’ asked Vitali. ‘Yes, stellar geography is an inconstant thing, but the changes you and I have both seen should have taken hundreds of thousands of years at least, not a few centuries.’

  ‘So what insights has the last three hours of staring at those maps given you?’

  ‘Regrettably none,’ he said, without disappointment. ‘Though I am greatly looking forward to discovering why this map no longer resembles the readings of our original, in-situ macroscopes. It’s been far too long since I ventured beyond the confines of Quatria’s orbital galleries.’

  Vitali gestured to the maps, the haptic sensors in his hands causing them to expand enormously and fill the room with shimmering points of light. ‘The archmagos himself requested my presence.’

  ‘Over the objections of the Martian Conclave,’ pointed out Linya.

  Vitali collapsed the star maps with an irritated gesture.

  ‘Kotov is no fool,’ he said. ‘He recognised my intimate knowledge of this region of space and knew my presence could mean the difference between glorious success and ignoble failure.’

  Linya said nothing, and Vitali was relieved. Even he wasn’t convinced by his words. He didn’t know why Lexell Kotov had exercised his precious veto, for the archmagos was not known as an adept given to gestures of emotional indulgence. Few were, but Kotov’s ruthless determination and harsh enforcement of protocol was legendary, even among a priesthood that viewed cold abruptness as a virtue.

  ‘Perhaps the loss of his forge world fiefs has granted Kotov a measure of humility,’ suggested Linya, and Vitali almost laughed.

  ‘I don’t believe that for a nanosecond,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, which makes me think Kotov has some other reason for asking you to come on this foolhardy expedition.’

  ‘And no doubt you have a theory as to what that reason might be?’

  ‘He’s desperate,’ said Linya. ‘His forge worlds were wiped out and even you must have heard the rumours about the petitions being made to the Fabricator General calling for Kotov’s Martian holdings to be seized. He knows he can’t get any of the more powerful magi to support him, and he needs a great success to re-establish his power base on Mars. Leading this expedition in search of Telok’s fleet is Kotov’s last chance to salvage his reputation. It’s his only hope of staving off the threats to his remaining forges.’

  Vitali nodded, but before he could muster even a token defence of Kotov’s prospects, a sharp rapping came at the shutter door of their shared quarters.

  ‘Yes, Mister Siavash?’ asked Vitali.

  A pause.

  ‘How did you know it was me?’ asked the young fighter. Vitali could hear the sound of his butterfly blade clicking and clacking in his nimble fingers.

  ‘Stride length, weight to decibel ratio of your footfalls,’ answered Vitali. ‘Not to mention that irritating tune you insist on whistling as you walk.’

  ‘Pride of Joura, that is,’ said Adara Siavash through the door. ‘My da used to play it on the flute when I was a lad, and–’

  ‘What do you want, Adara?’ asked Linya, interrupting yet another tale of the lad’s bucolic youth.

  ‘Hello, Miss Linya,’ said the young man, and even through the blast-sealed door Vitali could picture the young man blushing. ‘Captain Surcouf sent me to tell you that we’re almost ready to dock with the Speranza.’

  Roboute watched the Navy battleships cruising serenely at high orbit, little more than bright moving dots that winked and gleamed in the light of the distant sun. More aggressive cruisers wove patrol circuits around bloated mass-conveyors ready to transport the freshly-raised Guard regiments from the world below to the ever-expanding crusade in the Pergamus Sector. Joura was a proud world, a populous world, and one that routinely answered the call for soldiers to serve in the proud ranks of the Imperial Guard.

  The inexhaustible armies of the Emperor were only kept so by the men and women of worlds like Joura. The scale of the mass-conveyors was extraordinary, vast leviathans whose length and beam were impossible to comprehend as being able to move, let alone traverse the immense gulfs of space between star systems. Yet even they were overwhelmed by the gargantuan scale of the Speranza.

  Adara had brought Magos Tychon and his daughter to the command bridge, arriving just as the Renard began her approach run to the vast superstructure of the Ark Mechanicus. Though six hundred kilometres still separated the two vessels, the flank of Lexell Kotov’s flagship filled the viewing
bay. Less a ship, more a cliff of burnished steel and adamantium, it was a landscape of metal that defied rational understanding of how colossal a starship could possibly be.

  Vitali and Linya – who, Roboute had to admit, was an attractive, if slightly aloof woman – stared at the immense vessel with undisguised admiration. Even among the priests of the Mechanicus, to see a vessel of such age and marvel was an honour.

  ‘There’s a lot of ships in orbit,’ said Adara. ‘I’ve never seen so many.’

  ‘This is nothing,’ said Roboute. ‘You should see the conjunctions of Ultramar, those are gatherings like no other. Imagine a dozen worlds contributing to a muster. There’s so many ships in orbit that you could strap on an environment suit and stroll around the orbital equator without having to void walk, you’d just step from hull to hull.’

  ‘You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?’ said Adara. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Care to wager on that?’ asked Emil.

  ‘With you? Not on your life.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Emil, with a hurt pout. ‘Nobody wagers with me any more.’

  ‘That’s because you always win,’ said Roboute.

  ‘What can I say, I’m lucky,’ said Emil with a shrug.

  ‘Ultramar luck,’ said Adara.

  ‘There is no such thing as luck,’ put in Linya Tychon, without taking her pretty eyes from the viewing bay. ‘Only statistical probability, apophenia and confirmation bias.’

  ‘Then you and I need to play a few hands of Knights and Knaves,’ said Emil.

  Roboute chuckled, returning his attention to the viewing bay and the impossibly vast craft before his own ship.

  ‘Holy Terra...’ breathed Emil, finally looking up at the vessel he was flying towards.

  ‘You mean “Holy Mars”, surely?’ said Pavelka.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Emil. ‘That thing’s bloody enormous.’

  ‘Such masterful understatement,’ said Pavelka. ‘The Speranza is a vessel against which all others are diminished. All praise the Omnissiah.’