The Voice of Mars Read online

  Draevark flexed his lightning claws. Without power, each talon moved only with tremendous difficulty. As if he had a hundred kilos of adamantite cutting edge weighted to each knuckle. The fuel to the underslung flamers in their wrist cradles sloshed as they moved. Void war was very fine, but he preferred the straightforward immediacy of melee. Imposing his will over chaos and enforcing order. Nevertheless, he could see the mighty rivets of the Brutus’ hull plating dragging past the ancillary starboard oculi, a string of steel-framed sub-screens stitching together a live-feed from the strike cruiser’s flank. Their combined firepower was chewing through the disordered flotsam of ork shipping. The Strength Eternum and the Mount Volpurrn, as well as the torpedo destroyer Corpus Mechanicus, finally found the room to wedge in alongside their capital ships.

  The coordination of the five vessels’ firepower was imperious, a testament to the Iron Hands’ mastery of war.

  ‘Confirm that target matrix codephrases are being cycled every two point five seconds,’ said Draevark.

  ‘Confirmed.’

  In allowing the Omnipotence to wrest control of the Alloyed’s weaponry at Pariah-LXXVI, Kristos had crossed a line. Draevark had not spoken of the matter with Tartrak, the senior officer aboard the Borrgos Clan vessel, but he had no doubt that he felt the same. And now Kristos had demanded Haas join his harem of Apothecaries aboard the Omnipotence. Draevark glowered into space. Kristos was an Iron Father, a messiah to some, but even he had limits.

  The Iron Hands would suffer no absolute monarch. Not after Isstvan.

  ‘Lord!’ came the stressed cry of the slave at communications. ‘I have a signal.’

  Draevark basked in the pitiable glow of satisfaction. There was nothing like the prospect of bio-recycling or servitude perpetualis to encourage a mortal crew to find solutions to problems.

  ‘Do not make me ask for it,’ he growled.

  The crewman practically fought with his own hands to get the intercept on speakers. The signal was looped and distorted, the binaric chirp of the Alloyed’s vox-thief algorithms chattering through its sub-frequencies. Draevark tuned his audial devices to filter it out. It was Kristos. And the sibilant voice of an Adeptus Astartes battle-brother he did not recognise.

  ‘Welcome to the place of judgement, Omnipotence. Does your fleet require escort to Fabris Callivant?’

  ‘For my vessel only. My fleet can remain with yours.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Request authorisations to come aboard. We have much to discuss…’

  The signal terminated. A stilted whine ran through the augmitter grid. Draevark listened to it, his choler blackening.

  ‘My lord. The Omnipotence is trying to raise us. Shall I put her through?’

  ‘No,’ Draevark answered after a moment. ‘Inform the Iron Father that Clave Jalenghaal is already on its way to his ship.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘That is why the position of the Voice of Mars exists…’

  – Exogenitor Louard Oelur

  I

  The strings of a harpsiclave filled the cramped taberna with a pulsed vibrato. Rain muttered against the low roof, and fled down the faces of the muted grotesques that leered from the windows in stained glass. Melitan looked down, her hands shaped as if around the tubular neck of her instrument, but it was not her that was playing. She looked up, confused, through the cloud of lho smoke to the tiny corner stage where a woman in grimy red robes sat on a stool, her legs straddling the aluminium frame of the harpsiclave. The clavist’s head was bald, ringed by rad-scarring, her skin olive dark; her thighs, chest, face and in-folded hands were lit a shadowy blue by the plasmic resonance of plucked strings. The light occluded the woman’s face, as if it were too thick and heavy to make it across the room, and yet Melitan had the sickening certainty that it was her playing after all.

  ‘Bethania Vale,’ whispered Callun Darvo, leaning across from his chair at the table beside hers. His fingers drummed a nervous rat-a-tat on his table as he looked to the stage. His face too was difficult to make out, even though his hood was up. ‘I heard she was better.’

  The clavist shifted chord to a high frequency and Melitan drew her hand to her ear in sudden pain. The anonymous crowd of off-shift menials and labourers filling the taberna responded with approval.

  ‘I don’t know this piece,’ she shouted over the aggressively rising cadence.

  ‘It is called The Sapphire King.’ Tubriik Ares sat at her other side, as poorly defined as a nightmare. ‘It is not my favourite.’

  ‘There is something about it though,’ Callun argued.

  ‘It is always better the first time,’ said Ares.

  The pitch shifted upwards once again, and Melitan’s face sank to the table, both hands clamped to the sides of her head.

  ‘Bravo,’ Callun cheered, and started clapping.

  There was a metallic clunk as something heavy hit the stage, then another, and another, faster and heavier, rain hammering on a tin roof. Melitan lifted her face from the tabletop to see the clavist disappearing behind a rising pile of rejected augmetics. At the foot of the stage, a grunt mechanic rose from his seat, tears of joy running down his acid-scarred face as he sank fingers into his eye socket and gouged out a bionic eye. Blood streamed from the gaping socket in place of tears as he tossed the bloody metal into the heap, then thumped his bloody hands together in rapturous applause.

  The clavist rose from her stool and took a bow, but the music continued without her, louder, the plasma strings continuing to resonate. Melitan whimpered.

  It was not Bethania Vale anymore.

  It was Nicco Palpus.

  Pain drilled into her head through both ears and she screamed, clawing at the table, her fingernails as frictionless as lho smoke, choking on her own tongue, gasping, her brutal aneurysm going utterly unremarked next to the shriek of a harpsiclave and the baying of a crowd…

  II

  Melitan woke up screaming, the sound of a strummed harpsiclave pulsing through her thoughts. The dormitory cell was dark. It smelled of rust and her sweat. She half fell out of her cot, legs tangled in the bedding gauze, and stumbled towards the night-glow square of the control panel. Her legs collapsed from under her after two steps. Sobbing in pain, she buried her head in her hands as though she could bury the migraine. Reaching out with a clammy hand she found the wall, and walked it up the metal, using it for leverage to draw herself to an upright kneel. She puked against the wall and collapsed again.

  III

  The throbbing chord became an insistent buzz. It was not in her head anymore, but coming rather from three or four metres away in the dark. She grunted and spat bits of sick from her mouth. The taste of it coated her tongue. Her gorge rose again, but she swallowed it, grimacing, and struggled weakly to her feet. Her hand slapped along the wall until she found the knobs and switches of the control panel. The lights came on in a flood, clinical and bright, and she felt tears burn her eyes, whimpering at the sudden flurry of misfires in her brain. Covering her eyes, she ground the knuckles of both hands into her forehead.

  ‘Ave Omnissiah. What have you done to me?’

  The thought of Palpus’ meme-proxy reworking her neural architecture while she slept threatened a second wave of tears.

  What would be left when it was finished? Would it still be Melitan Yolanis that returned to present her findings to the Voice of Mars? A fragment of dream imagery jittered just out of reach, and she shuddered as she felt its escape.

  Or would it be Bethania Vale?

  The buzzer sounded again. Five seconds exactly after the last. She looked up. The door chime. Wiping tears from her face and managing to smear her cheek with sick from her sleeve into the bargain she hurried to the door. She deactivated the lock switch and the door slid away.

  The foetal cherub hovered in the corridor, loose sparks drizzling from its arcane propu
lsors, the burned odour of warped gravity. Its single distended eye, the blue data gem forced into its tiny ­mummified socket, stared through her as if the state of her cell were abhorrent to it.

  She covered her mouth with her hand and made a concerted effort not to throw up.

 

  Its use of that name, in a binaric form she was certain she should not be able to decode, made her eyes water. Nicco Palpus hadn’t warned her about any of this. Why hadn’t he warned her? She thought of Callun. He had been in her dream, she was sure, which he probably would have enjoyed had he been alive to hear about it. The memory of him left her feeling oddly despondent. She would have given anything for the chance to wake in the communal dorm on the Broken Hand and find that the past few months had all been a bad dream.

  She would have genuinely appreciated someone noticing that she was wearing her stomach contents and caring enough to mention it just then.

 

  Melitan punched the door controls and the doors hissed shut, cutting the servitor short.

  ‘He can wait five minutes more for me to get dressed.’

  IV

  Exogenitor Louard Oelur waited for her in the airlock clean room, his bulk spread over a litter of woven steel borne across the shoulders of six hunch-backed draught servitors. The walls were noospherically proofed. The doors both into the contact laboria and out into the analytica suites were hermetically sealed and could be opened only in alternation. Melitan’s own anti-tracking wetware informed her of the array of auspex scanners and recording apparatus buried inside the walls. Scores of concealed adepts would even now be poring over her body scans and exload signatures. She gave a breathy cough, dislodging a lump of sick from between her prosthetic teeth, and tried unsuccessfully to wipe it on the back of her robes.

  She hoped they appreciated what they saw.

  The outer airlock door whistled shut behind Melitan as she entered, decontamination sprays that smelled of high-percentage alcohol rinsing her front and back.

  A robo-mastiff lunged out of the ethanol mist with a growl.

  She flung herself back against the closed door with a startled cry, the mastiff’s chain rattling as it shoved its muzzle into her belly, between her legs, snuffled along both arms. The mechanics of the hound’s thinking processes snarled as it processed its exload samples. She cringed as far back into the door as she could go. But Palpus’ codes were good. It backed off with a growl, disappointment she was sure, and slunk back to its keeper, trailing chain.

  Its keeper was a vat-grown colossus of upper body brawn, clad in a harness of studded leather armour. She was female, residually, but so altered by androstane therapies and surgical modifications that gender identification was barely relevant. A fan of electroprobes ran along her bald head, trilling wires strung between them. Her mouth was an overspilling mess of audio-sounders and kill switches. The mark of the Legio Cybernetica was branded into the bare flesh of one atrophied breast. Various cohort and hierarchy sigils decorated what was left of her skin. Her hands had been grafted together and packed in rockrete. The chain that held the robo-mastiff ran straight into her forearms, where it became part of the bone. She needed every last kilogram. The robo-mastiff was built like an attack bike, its default cognisance only barely checking its instinct to maul and rend anything with a noospheric signature.

  The five-man squad of skitarii rangers, encased in reflective carapace and with holstered sidearms at least made the effort to scan Melitan unobtrusively.

  The Legio Cybernetica keeper made a stuffed-mouth crooning sound, eyes rolling madly, as Melitan tore her eyes away, unpeeled herself from the door and shuffled towards Exogenitor Oelur.

  ‘You must forgive the security precautions, Magos Vale.’ A viperous nest of mechadendrites undulated out from the exogenitor’s bloated core structure, his secondary head listing from his neck as the swollen magos attempted a shrug. ‘But this is what the logi-legatus sent you here to assess, is it not?’

  The cherub servitor droned towards Louard’s litter, chittering away on a binaric register.

  Melitan felt a moment’s pain, as if a screwdriver that had already been buried in her skull was being rotated forty-five degrees, as her implants realigned to translate the higher order hexamathic.

 

 

  Melitan fought to control her smile.

  Her dream was already fading from memory, the eerie feeling it had left in the back of her mind and under her skin almost forgotten. She had become so acclimated to subterfuge that she expected it everywhere. But perhaps Nicco Palpus fretted over nothing, and Louard Oelur really was just what he seemed – the ancient and petty lord of his particular dark corner of Mars. The icon she had glimpsed in his offices could easily have been something left there in error, planted by another, overlooked by a senior magos with more important concerns on his mind.

  Who knew what effects the meme-proxy could be having on her capacities?

  ‘Well, Magos Vale? I trust Tier Zero’s first-line precautions are satisfactory.’

  Her eyes drifted back towards the robo-mastiff. It glared back at her with pre-programmed hunger.

  ‘Exemplary,’ said Melitan.

  ‘As you have no doubt discerned, the chamber is airtight. It is noospherically dark. There is no way, physical or metaphysical, of breaching containment. You will have noted the baffles in the walls.’ Melitan had not, but looked at them now, rows of tiny holes perforating the metal sheeting. ‘That is the ventilation system. He banged on the wall with one claw-tipped mechadendrite. It responded hollowly. ‘Even the ventilation flows are directionally gated and subjected to vigorous containment. The air supplied to the laboria is on a completely distinct system to that which supplies the outer rings.’

  ‘Impressive,’ said Melitan.

  ‘As I believe I informed you it would be.’ His slave head twitched, left to right, as the exogenitor consulted his mnemonic references. His primary head nodded once. ‘Indeed I did.’ At a silent command, his litter bearers turned towards the inner airlock door. The skitarii rangers fell in alongside. The Legio Cybernetica keeper shuffled in behind with a clank of chains.

  ‘We will begin with a tour of excise and clearing.’

  The ranger alpha, marked out by a single white line across his chest plate and a dense array of communications gear on his helmet, stiffened as his systems interfaced with those of the door controls. There was a few seconds’ pause while the authorisations spat through the adjoining control rooms. Melitan bit her lip. Then the big door irised open onto a stub of corridor and another door behind.

  ‘That is where all personnel are clerked for duty and all equipment that has cleared quarantine is subject to periodic rechecking,’ Oelur continued. The procession filed into the airlock, skitarii first, keeper last, Melitan and Louard Oelur in the middle. The door shut behind them and locked. Her ears popped. She heard the hiss as air pressures equalised. ‘The laboria are held at negative pressure,’ Oelur explained, waving a fat carcass of a hand. ‘For obvious reasons.’

  There was a gasp, of relief almost, as the inner door irised open.

  Swallowing her nerves, Melitan followed her escort inside.

  The lights in this section of Tier Zero were noticeably brighter. The walls were panelled with smoothly interlocking metal plates of a reflective, iridescent alloy. Every section of corridor was joined to the next by a collapsible blast door. Twitching sentry guns watched every approach. Lighting came from lume strips that ran parallel to the floor along both walls. The strips’ proximity to Melitan’s eyes was presumably why their output felt so astringent and bright. The strips brok
e where they hit recessed doorways, forked into two to run around armourglass windows, intensifying the effect of the light and effectively masking what was inside.

  Melitan split off from her skitarii escort to go to the first window and peer inside.

  Clusters of robed adepts sat across several metal tables, ferrying trays of some manner of organic material from a dispensary for close-range bio-sensory analysis at their tables.

  ‘What is this?’

  Oelur’s lips peeled away from a cruciform grin.

  ‘It is the refectory, Magos Vale.’

  Melitan suppressed a sudden blush.

  ‘Forgive my neglect,’ Oelur rumbled, fumbling entirely his reading of her embarrassment. ‘It has been four hundred and eighty-three years since last I ingested organic sustenance in that fashion. You are only recently awoken. Do you wish to break fast before we proceed?’

  Melitan’s recently voided stomach knotted in rebellion.

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  V

  There were more invasive checks waiting in excise and clearing. Melitan was ordered to spread her arms while lexmechanics and enginseers wielding portable auspex units scanned her. While they fiddled with dials and compared scans, a heavily armed skitarius frogmarched her towards the low arched entrance of the modular tunnel that ran along the near-side wall.

  It was dark inside, confined, and filled with the thunderous echo of deep-penetrating scanners. She felt the arcane devices pry into the bone, into the marrow, into the nucleic structure. Her stomach flipped and flopped as the deep booms went off around her. It was inconceivable that such potent Dark Age technologies would not uncover the false augments that Nicco Palpus had installed in her to make her look the part, but their dummy signals were somehow adequate to the scrutiny. She let out a long breath as she emerged, blinking and deafened, from the other side into a thorough patdown from another steel-faced skitarius.