The Voice of Mars Read online

  At the next ramp up, they found a squad of Guardsmen blocking the road off with a Chimera. The Guardsmen watched in a huddle as local enforcement checked the identity chits of those being let through on foot.

  The off-world soldiers wore royal-blue uniforms overspilling with gold braid, starched and stiff as the men inside. Buttons shone. Lasguns were meticulously handled. Peaked caps dripped, causing the padding in their shoulders to flag. The Chimera too was such a parade ground-perfect blue it looked as if it had been sprayed to the road surface. None of them had any place on this miserable globe. Too perfect for the war coming their way. A Mordian Armoured Fist squad. Eleven regiments of that world had been deployed to Fabris Callivant, but their badges and insignia marked them as Third Squad, Ninth Platoon, 74th Company of the Mordian XXIV Armoured.

  One of the local enforcers, a short, hefty man in a black flak vest, stern lines and a grazing of facial hair visible beneath the green slate of his half-visor, leafed through Laana’s soggy papers. A shotgun hung from his shoulder by the strap.

  Rauth considered each of seventeen ways he could crush the man against the wall and beat his comrades to death with his shotgun.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Laana asked.

  The man cursed under his breath, flapping the wet off the papers and holding them up against his wall light, the occasional nervous glance thrown in Rauth’s direction. ‘Minor skirmish. Nothing to worry about.’

  Laana covered her open mouth with her hand, a poor affectation of an anxious feudal slave, but the man’s mind was occupied. ‘You’d think the Frateris Aequalis had trouble enough with the invasion.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to know what goes through their minds,’ the enforcer grunted, returning her papers. They were perfect. Naturally. ‘Last tram to Machenv leaves in twenty minutes. You don’t want to miss curfew.’

  With icy sweetness, she thanked the officer.

  ‘Keep your hand on your shotgun,’ Rauth grunted, as he followed her through the checkpoint. The enforcer stiffened and immediately clasped his weapon to his body armour.

  My bit for the war.

  The bridges on the other side of the checkpoint benefitted from superior weather protection, more of the same time-dimmed pictorial glass presenting the hammering rain with scenes of Imperial Knights in war and peace. Laana shook off her coat.

  One section of wall and half the road had been cordoned off by more armed enforcers. Investigators picked through the debris of what looked like a high-speed pursuit and its terminating crash. There were tyre scuffs in the road, a spray of bullets riddling the weatherproofed glass. In the middle of that arcing spray of fire, a Cog Mechanicus had been stencilled over a faded diorama of a Knight of House Callivant, while a force of Iron Hands battled what appeared to be a horde of Legiones Astartes depicted as a many-headed wave of serpents.

  I know this, realised Rauth. The Heresy War. The 34th Clan Company of Clan Morragul, ‘the Brazen Claws’, garrisoned to Fabris Callivant in payment of a debt and largely spared the fires of Isstvan for their sins. A servitor was air-blasting the graffiti from the glass. Only the human half of the icon remained. It was on the wrong side. Rauth could have dismissed it as the ignorance of the artist but something about the symbol struck him as subtly, deeply wrong. He frowned, an itch in his skull, trying to remember where he had seen such an emblem before but could not.

  ‘The Frateris Aequalis,’ Laana said, then spat.

  The assassin skipped up a set of stairs wide enough to accommodate a thousand. Mirroring the native Callivantines, she shrugged her raincoat back on, splashing up the waterfall that cascaded down the stone steps.

  Rauth strode up after her. The steps bore out onto an open plaza, busy still, but less boisterous for being open to the full flurry of the elements.

  A network of landing pads of various sizes spread out like balanced plates, criss-crossed by walkways and disrupted by the occasional fortress spire. Bulk lifters powered down and hauled up. Mono-task servitors loaded, unloaded, refuelled, gave directions to the occasional bewildered off-world clerk and drove laden pallets of materiel to and fro. Men in rain-soaked tabards waved fluorescent paddles, becoming part of the chaos rather than conductors of it, caught helplessly in a flow of soldiers that churned through rain-pummelled spumes of coolant and promethium exhaust.

  Rauth made a warning noise in the back of his throat, almost dislocating Laana’s shoulder as he dragged her behind a pillar plastered in weather-sheeted instructional leaflets.

  A pair of colossally armoured Space Marines emerged from the grey. Their armour was the lifeless white of a dwarf star, with an aureole of gold. The dense plates were inscribed with scripture and verse. On their left pauldron, the red Hospitallers cross was emblazoned. A morbid array of symbols including hourglasses, skull-embossed shields and aquilae filled their right. Rauth presumed they denoted squad and company allegiances, but if the Hospitallers were a Codex-compliant Chapter, they certainly made it difficult to interpret it from their markings. I don’t suppose that I care. Even with their ambling, platform-shuddering walk, they outpaced the flesh-and-blood soldiers that surged about them.

  They clumped past Rauth and Laana’s hiding place.

  ‘Wait,’ Rauth hissed in the assassin’s ear, as though arguing over one of the edicts on the message pillar. I don’t need to try hard to look argumentative either. He could only assume that the Hospitallers’ senses were as sharp as his. Sharper even, with the advantages of Mk VII power armour. Inquisitor Yazir had gambled that a neophyte Space Marine offered the advantages of a mature Space Marine without attracting as much of the attention.

  Rauth knew it wouldn’t fool the genuine article.

  Once the two Hospitallers had sunk back into the rain, he let out a relieved breath and nodded.

  ‘Come on. I can see the comms station.’

  The structure that Laana took them to was a squat, square-walled building, a bunker in all but name, with a small transceiver dish gathering rain on its flat roof and a flickering lumen sign above its door. It was the ward communications hub.

  It was busy inside too.

  Suddenly tense, he hunched his shoulders and entered first.

  It was the crowds. They made him uneasy. The bubbling churn of several hundred human beings existing in the same place all at once, the sweet floral-base aromatics they applied to disguise the stench of their flesh, the static charge of cheap fabric rubbing against cheap fabric. He hated it. Rauth had lived his entire life, but for brief, explosive episodes, in an armoured box shared with about a dozen others. Medusa was an inhospitable desert, its one city essentially emptied for most of its year.

  His training with Sergeant Tartrak had taken him off-world more than once, of course, but never to a world like this.

  Everyone looked so… weak.

  He spent a few unimpressed seconds scanning the room, his bristling presence quickly emptying it of those without actual business to attend, while Laana sidled into the queue for one of the comm booths.

  With all the signal traffic dicing the near-orbital bands, raising the Lady Grey from a portable vox-device was one step back from impossible. The Hospitallers in their power armour could have done so easily, literally with the blink of an eye, but Rauth was not so fortunate. He scowled at the thought. After the battering Clan Borrgos had taken on Thennos, full status as a battle-brother was almost assured as soon as the inquisitor released him and Khrysaar from her service.

  The idea excited and sickened him in equal measure.

  After a short wait, Laana picked up a handset. She punched in a few numbers, followed by her identity chit. The terminal clicked through a sequence of keys as it established the required connections. She held it to her ear, absently watching the rain. Rauth listened with crossed arms for two minutes until the assassin mutely passed him the handset.

  The voice on the other end had been
warped by passage through a vox-distorter, but was recognisably female. ‘Laana tells me you saw where the bodies are being sent.’

  ‘Not exactly. It is not Exar Sevastian, but in one of the chirurgeon’s memories there is a figure that I recognised from the picts you provided. One of his senior adepts, perhaps. I don’t know his name, but I would recognise him if I saw him again.’

  ‘A fair beginning. Did you see nothing else?’

  ‘They were inside. A Mechanicus facility. Big enough to hold a lot of people.’

  ‘That does little to limit the search.’

  ‘There was a lot to take in,’ Rauth snarled. ‘There might be more still to come to me.’ He was quiet a moment, a faint itching in his metal hand. ‘Do you still think Sevastian is the one the Voice of Mars gave it to?’

  ‘I am certain of it. Exar Sevastian and Nicco Palpus’ fates have crossed too often over the past half millennium. Furthermore, Sevastian was with Kristos on the world you call Columnus. His holdings there were destroyed utterly. It is my supposition that Sevastian will have earned a return to favour here only by Palpus’ grace. It is safe to assume that Sevastian owes Palpus a turn of the wheel.’

  Rauth grunted. The inquisitor had her own way of speaking, constantly slipping into peculiar metaphors and magniloquence.

  ‘The only question is where to find it. Catching Sevastian is like catching your own shadow.’

  ‘And you think these illicit tournaments are where to find him?’ Rauth shuddered. ‘Cybermancy. A fighting pit for glorified servitors?’

  ‘Every being has its vice.’

  He gave a snort. Not every being. ‘Give me a few hours. I’ll find him.’

  ‘No. Fort Callivant will shortly be under military curfew, and I do not wish to antagonise local enforcement if I do not have to. Threaten officers with rosettes and talk will follow. The next thing you know you are hunting Exar Sevastian’s noosphere ghost.’ Rauth gave a reluctant grunt of agreement. ‘In any case, I want Khrysaar to take over from here.’

  ‘But he–’

  ‘I want Apothecary Mohr to check you over again.’

  ‘I’m fine. And all I have is a visual description of an adept. The memory is in my head.’

  The voice on the end of the line hesitated. Just a fraction of a second. ‘No. I need one of you or Khrysaar under Cullas’ observation at all times.’

  Liar.

  Rauth blinked, unsure what had brought out that thought with such venom.

  ‘Yes, inquisitor.’ The phantom itch in his bionic hand had become intolerable, and he scratched it against his thigh carapace. He glared around the handset at Laana as though she were the cause.

  ‘The shuttle is waiting at Pad Theta. Do not linger. I have received a communication that leads me to fear that Kristos is aware of our presence, assuming the coming invasion has not already tipped our hand. Things are about to get very complicated, very soon, and with complication comes opportunity.’

  The line went dead.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Their resistance only illustrates their illogic.’

  – Magos Qarismi

  I

  There had been a time when Draevark could access simulus for a split-second inload and emerge ready for battle in moments. As the centuries had worn by, he had noticed it taking longer to inload the same quality of information. His recovery times had lengthened too. Apothecary Haas had charted it. He was currently averaging twelve and a half minutes between termination of simulus and full combat awareness.

  >>ALERT>>

  He looked groggily into the synesthetic jumble of cross-wired senses. Messily rendered figures danced and teased and bled colour, an intermediate breed of figment, neither an artefact of the mind nor a product of external stimuli. Something in between. They were tall, approaching a Space Marine in height, but freakishly slender. An abstract art form. Tall helms enclosed their faces. Their firearms were as inscrutable as the runes etched into them: no trigger mechanism, no power source, no ammunition feed that threat analysis wetware could understand. Powerblades, mirror swords and lightning spears shone with a lethal perfection.

  A banshee shrieked through his brain, forcing coherent thoughts onto slower side paths of myelinated fibres rather than the newer of plastek and copper. Something about the warriors was intrinsically blurred.

  >>ALERT>>

  But they were warriors. That he could see.

  His reflection melted across armour scales of alien plasteks. A tombstone of black ceramite and plasteel, riveted, corded by cables, a vulturine helm with a grilled undersection that seemed to be screaming, screaming.

  He looked away, disoriented by the psychotropic effects of after-simulus.

  Revivification runes streamed through his enhanced vision, the flitting forms slowly beginning to disintegrate, erupting into a storm of pixels as though vaporised by blasts of optical plasma. Others did not discorporate so completely. Morphing, as opposed to simply atomising, shrinking and bulking out, shedding outer skins like alien caterpillars giving rise to hard, machine-bitten mortal men.

  The Iron Hands serfs stood bent over consoles, stabbed sullenly at control slates, criss-crossing each other without ever speaking as they moved from post to empty post. Their eyes had the hollowed-out, socketed look of men who had seen horror and could no longer be moved by it. They wore black uniforms over hard, vat-graft muscle.

  A Catachan might be bigger, a Mordian more precise, a Kriegan more willing to toss his pathetic life into a bullet at his lord’s command, but there was no man in the Imperium colder.

  No planet bred survivors like Draevark’s.

  >>ALERT!>>

  The Alloyed spoke to him, forcefully, and this time he heeded. He read the screed as it spilled over his optic inputs.

  >>>PURGE OF THE SUNRISE HERALD > ELDAR > SUB-DESIGNATION ‘ALAITOC’ > 009411.M37 >>> SIMULUS CANCELLED >>> ALERT >>> PRIORITY ALERT >>>

  With a hiss of gurgling hydraulics, he twisted his head. An alarm flashed against the hooked beak of his helmet. The image of a bounding eldar warrioress skipped across his synapses and he mentally flinched. His metallic body was incapable. He purged his optics and reinitialised. The banshee fled into his subconscious like a bad dream. Something deeply organic screeched in bitterness and pain as a nerve spike withdrew. There was a scrape and a rattle as the adaptor plug unhooked from his armour and flailed about within the confined space of the simulus alcove.

  Freezing vapours scented with revivifying salts from the sands of Mars blasted his battleplate as he staggered from the alcove.

  A mass of Mechanicus adepts pursued him. Their wire-threaded robes churned the heavier-than-air condensate into something boneless and grasping. Draevark ignored it, and them, as they sanctified his ancient Tactical Dreadnought plate with holy oils.

  ‘Report,’ he snarled.

  ‘Shadow-class eldar cruiser, seven-five-five, forward.’ Sergeant Artex’s voice was a brash monotone, compounded by a sullen echo, as if it had been relayed through his battleplate by the Alloyed itself. The five battle-brothers of his demi-clave stationed on the command deck regarded Draevark emptily. They might have still been in simulus themselves for all the reaction they gave.

  ‘Exactly where Kristos said it would be,’ Draevark murmured.

  ‘Position and heading precisely as the magos calculi predicted,’ said Artex.

  ‘After eighteen months of waiting, I was beginning to suspect Qarismi had divined this one incorrectly.’

  ‘How does it feel, I wonder,’ said Artex. ‘To devote your obscene existence to the manipulation of fate only to be exposed, now, by the powers of the calculus?’

  ‘I wonder what else the calculum prognosticae reveals,’ Draevark muttered darkly. ‘The importance of this vessel, for instance, why one ship should justify a fleet of ours sitting idle for so long.’
/>   Artex regarded him hollowly. ‘You emerge from simulus bitter.’

  ‘It is a heavy weapon to wield.’

  ‘Which is why we wield it. We will become stronger for it.’

  In melancholic agreement, Draevark looked up to the main oculus.

  The alien ship was impossibly delicate, a bauble of gold wire and frozen glass spinning through an infinite gulf of space. The Pariah-LXXVI sun was a single pin amidst a mess of scattered stars. The sunlet’s dim white light prickled the intricate contouring of the alien vessel’s hull, a feeble ripple across the bi-dimensional weave of its photonic sails. The sidereal wobble of the webway portal to which it ran disturbed the star field twenty million kilometres off its elegant bow, a nascent shimmer as it drew its sails. For a second, the eldar ship appeared to drift under the star-shadow of her pursuers, inertia alone turning her with an inhuman elegance that the tech-priests of the Alloyed could never match with thrusters. Then it caught the wind. Sails ripped taut and in the switching of an optic cycle, the slender vessel had gone from near-static to hyper-velocity. It cut between the strike cruiser Brutus and her escorts. Strobing pulsar beams stripped the larger vessel’s void shields, and it was aft of the Imperial warships, leaving them to chase its holo-ghosts before any of them had the chance to return fire.

  Typical Clan Borrgos, too keen to get in close.

  Cross-referencing the eldar vessel’s shape and markings through the Alloyed’s xenoglyphic archives, Draevark arrived at an eighty-four per cent profile match.

  Isha’s Spear.

  The vessel had twice been engaged by the Clan Morlaag destroyer Tempered Claw in late M35. Alas, in the wake of the Moirae Schism, the Tempered Claw had been incorporated into the fleet of the Sons of Medusa Chapter and had taken its more detailed simulus recordings with it. Pity. Assimilated insights and tested tactics, proven over nine thousand years of conflict between the Alaitoc Craftworld and Clan Garrsak, trickled into his active memory. A generic tri-D schematic mapped to his visor display, underlying the oculus view of the eldar vessel with internal architecture calculated from the Sunrise Herald and a hundred other previously boarded ships of its approximate class.