The Voice of Mars Read online

  Kristos, to his annoyance, did not react.

  Magos Qarismi scraped his staff with apparent interest through the litter scattered over the alien mosaic.

  ‘I ordered you to supervise the exorcism of the alien machine’s spirit,’ said Kristos, without turning.

  ‘The Voice of Mars has given me other instructions.’

  ‘That supersede mine?’ said Kristos, finally deigning to rotate his torso.

  ‘An astropathic distress cry has reached Medusa. The logi-legatus had it retransmitted to us.’

  ‘In the eighteen months we have waited here, I have listened to thousands. What makes this plea worthy of the resources of my clan?’

  ‘It is Fabris Callivant.’

  For several seconds the Iron Father did nothing, but from the directional illumination of his optics he appeared to be looking at Telarrch. Or possibly the eldar shipmaster crushed under his armour.

  ‘Yeldrian.’

  Qarismi’s aluminium skull was locked into a deep-socketed grin.

  Jalenghaal watched him, and the Iron Father, and his brother-sergeants. The phrase ‘Never trust’ rang in his mind. There was more at play here than he, or even Draevark, had been made fully aware of.

  ‘Not this time,’ said the magos calculi.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Innovative… Though I suspect, not one hundred per cent intentional.’

  – Magos Instructor Yuriel Phi

  I

  ‘Base systems report rising levels of distress.’

  Kardan Stronos heard Magos Instructor Yuriel Phi speaking from the operations cradle, a hanging candelabrum of screen glow and heat-stressed transfer cabling. Smudges of blue-white light in the thick incense smoke were her eyes. Her skin was coated with iron scales. Plug-in cables of various capacitance fell from her recurved scalp like the dreadlocks of a technobarbarian of old, tethering her to the cradle as securely as the profusion of throbbing guy wires tethered her cradle itself to the ceiling.

  ‘Recommend that you prioritise the primaris generator. At the current rate of increase it will experience catastrophic overload in approximately eleven minutes.’

  ‘Compliance,’ said Stronos.

  The distance to the generatorum controls was short, but crammed with active machinery. The smoke was thick. Like a rag soaked in alchemical euphorics to the face of a doubting pupil. Stronos no longer had an active sense of smell, or taste, and he gave rare thanks to the iron for that. His armour too he had shed, or as much of it as he could whilst retaining the ability to function. Even so, he scraped and squealed towards the array of intestinal cabling and push-button operations on the other side of the pit.

  An alarm wailed from a sconce above the subsystem, its flashing light clutched in the mouth of a gargoyle of aged bronze. Stronos could have silenced it with a one-word command, but he could ignore it just as easily. Studying the complexity of plug-ins and panels, he sensed the approach of another and shot a glance over the shoulder.

  ‘It will take two of us to calm this spirit, brother.’ Barras was a fortress world of frown lines, eyes so deep under dark rings that they could have been excavated from stone. He was three times Stronos’ junior. With his own facial scars and metallic reconstructions Stronos easily made it look like ten.

  He turned back to the subsystem. ‘I have this.’

  ‘It is not a competition, Iron Hand.’

  Stronos snorted, replacement lungs forcing cold, oil-tainted air through the ugly metal tube that served him as both mouth and nose. He did not trouble himself to look up a second time. ‘I have this.’ His hand shot out as the Knight of Dorn attempted to reach across him. The knuckled steel of the bionic closed over the other warrior’s bare hand to the wrist. Dashed lines and Medusan numerals flickered across his bionic vision, interfacing with the hand to display applied force and points of stress. He took care not to crush his brother’s radial bone. ‘I have this. Was I unclear?’

  Yuriel’s chuckle rattled through the murk like a propeller with a bent blade. ‘Clarification – we are all about to experience catastrophic overload.’

  ‘Stand by.’ Releasing Barras’ wrist, he set a hand upon the generatorum unit’s body housing, muttering a machine-soothing canticle under his breath as he tapped the meter into the button-push controls.

  Somewhere amidst the house fire of girders and smoke, one of the alarms shut off.

  He turned his nerveless ruin of a face to the Knight of Dorn. A lifeless expression of petty triumph hung from the metal dermis like meat from a hook. Barras, for his part, bore a bruised wrist and a murderous frown.

  ‘When we are both armoured brother, you and I will settle this as equals in the duelling cage.’

  Dominance rituals. How pitifully organic.

  He gave the aggrieved warrior a nod.

  ‘You have coupled the generator to the overflow regulators of the core cogitator,’ declared Magos Phi, her voice resonating from the smoky above like the voice of the Omnissiah. ‘Innovative, though I suspect, not one hundred per cent intentional.’ For a moment, Stronos felt the bristling flutter of annoyance. Barras smirked and turned away.

  The annoyance did not depart so readily.

  For one hundred and fifty years, Stronos had served an execrably human Imperium with the conviction that the primarch’s seed and the Iron Creed had combined in the Iron Hands to forge a thousand warriors without peer. How aggravating then to discover only now that there were others in that much-maligned Imperium of Man who were just as experienced, adept and resolute as Kardan Stronos, that his gene-seed in no way predestined him to superiority.

  It reminded him of something that his friend Lydriik had tried to tell him.

  There are many ways of being strong, brother. Almost as many as there are of convincing yourself you are not weak.

  Shrugging it off as he would any irritant glitch in his systems he checked over the partially illuminated display in front of him, rubbing oil-smear from the blinking command line with a finger. ‘Thirteen minutes and thirty seconds to overload.’

  ‘Hail the machine-touched,’ he heard Barras mutter.

  ‘A reasonable estimate,’ rattled Magos Phi. ‘But some machines are willing to a fault. They will tell you they can go on when in reality they are an operation from collapse. A Techmarine must know the character of each of his charges in order to see through its claims to the truth beneath. I would put your time closer to twelve minutes.’

  If Stronos could have scowled he would have scowled. If his face could redden it would have bathed the machine pit in bloody smoke. Instead, he looked to the rest of his so-called brothers for better news.

  Baraquiel of the Angels Porphyr did not even notice him, wholly engaged wrestling with an errant system, the halved blue and white of his robes periodically obscured by vomiting gouts of steam. The mortal priests of Mars held many advantages in piety and dedication, but they could not match a determined Adeptus Astartes warrior for the sheer brawn required to humble a truculent machine.

  Thecian, by contrast, was so still he might have been meditating. He was of the Exsanguinators, a lesser Chapter that Stronos would never have heard of had they not been seconded to the same scholam facility. His skin was as bloodless as a serpent’s abandoned skin, mildly luminous even when enfolded by smoke, more a thing of fine marble than imperfect flesh. Every so often, he blinked, skin scraping his eyes like a sharpening stone, but otherwise he did not appear to be doing anything at all. Of them all, Stronos considered him the most difficult to understand.

  Even Barras, for all his emotion and fixation on honour, was comprehensible.

  The Knight of Dorn, lightly garbed in robes of tan and bone, moved back the way Stronos had come with enviable ease. He stopped at a suffering array of pipes and fed his hands through with a grunt to massage the valves behind.

  Sigart, the
last of their unlikely brotherhood, would be nearby.

  Learning much from Stronos’ failures no doubt.

  None of them had yet earned the right to ‘take the red’ or to don the Machina Opus on their gear, but each warrior’s Chapter colours, Stronos’ silver and black included, were overlain with the sleeveless red surplice of an aspirant of Mars. They were here because they were the best of an exceptional cadre of aspirants to the lore of Mars.

  Stronos was here because he was an Iron Hand and the treaties between their two worlds demanded it – a fact he would never be allowed to forget.

  Excluding the absent Sigart, none of the aspirants had more than a metre or two of cramped and overheated machinery between him and a brother. Stronos found the physical proximity repellent, the insistence on verbal communication disarming, the fact that he could not feel their thoughts or track their efforts through his data-tethers both annoying and deeply, irrationally, suspicious.

  Baraquiel disengaged from the radiation manifold and looked up to the thrumming operations cradle. ‘One of us must enter to the generatorum chamber and shut it down manually. I volunteer myself.’

  ‘Do not look at me, aspirant,’ Yuriel chided.

  ‘Go,’ Stronos and Barras spoke at the same time, then glared at one another as Baraquiel picked his way back through the mess of exposed machinery and disappeared into the smoke.

  Stronos heard a door slide open. He heard it slide shut.

  Exactly seventeen seconds had elapsed before the Space Marine’s voice echoed through the chamber’s master vox.

  ‘The emergency bulkheads are sealed. I cannot access the blasted chamber.’

  ‘Amputation of endangered sectors is the basic response of any high-functioning gestalt.’ Yuriel offered this in a tone that suggested to Stronos that she may have been examining her cuticle circuitry. ‘I am disappointed that none of you thought to consider this. You have…’ A pause, presumably while she consulted a rune display. ‘…Nine minutes to catastrophic overload.’

  Stronos’ armour shuddered and growled, the power servos emitting a noise akin to a Land Raider stuck in a neutral gear. It felt his frustration through intramuscular spikes and point-to-point nervous control, and strained to convert it into action. Lowering his forehead to the generatorum rune display, he instructed his system tethers to lace with those of the interface.

  A tremor of violation passed through the connection.

  His systems were purposed for battlefield networking rather than machine-to-machine interfacing, and both sets of systems responded with blurts of warning screed, smearing his bionic eye like a weeping infection, as he brute-forced the connection.

  Stronos had no difficulty in making out Magos Phi through the smoke now. His awareness impinged upon the noosphere, the parallel reality of raw data and of the Motive Force, and she was incandescent as an angel.

  And then he felt it.

  The scholam facility’s collective cognisance was a bruised thing, hostile and indescribably ancient, self-aware only in the manner of a predatory reptile, but aware of him in that same sense, hungrily aware of their disparity of power.

  Stronos bombarded the base’s spirit with command authorisations and runes of impeachment, but either he had erred in their construction or the chimeric spirit was too angered to heed them.

  It reared large, looming over and enveloping him in this dimensionless nooverse, and seared his mind with a hiss of nonsense static.

 

  Stronos felt his body stagger as his senses were driven from the noosphere, networked systems instinctively shutting down and withdrawing into their armoured shell. Sparks erupted from the interface, the physical manifestation of the base’s anger, and slammed him into the cogitator housing opposite.

  Magos Phi’s rattling laughter rang out from above, the percussive thud of sealing bulkheads running through the loose metal flooring under Stronos’ prone body.

  He could sense the spirit mocking him.

  ‘Another set of emergency doors has just lowered behind me,’ voxed Baraquiel. ‘I am sealed in.’

  Yuriel added an ironic handclap to her laughter.

  ‘Believe me, aspirant, you were let off with a rapped knuckle.’

  The children of Manus were little known for the speed and incision of their wit, and Stronos was still putting together a response when the alarms abruptly terminated. The main lights hardened to a humming brightness and with a whirring clunk of distressed machinery, extractors came online and began making voluble attempts at sucking smoke into decrepit vents. For once, his gormless features expressed precisely the emotion he would otherwise have expected them to convey.

  ‘What did I…?’

  ‘A wounded beast will not permit the thorn to be removed from its paw,’ said Thecian. His smile was something a chisel might inflict on a tablet. ‘Even by a caring master. It needs a distraction.’

  ‘You mean…?’ Stronos felt the infantile urge to tell the Exsanguinator that they could settle this as equals in the duelling cage. Instead, he simply fell silent.

  Magos Phi was more effusive. ‘Well done, Aspirant Thecian. And Stronos.’ She peered over her cradle, optics blinking blue-white, on-off. ‘See me after evening prayers.’

  Stronos bowed his head. ‘Yes, magos instructor.’

  ‘And after that you can see me,’ said Barras, grabbing Stronos’ pauldron as he moved past to haul him close and hiss it in his ear.

  The Knight of Dorn half climbed through the intervening hardware towards the door. Stronos noticed that it was open, another aspirant wearing ink-black robes under his crimson surplice stooping under and swaggering through. There was a single white cross on the aspirant’s black sleeve, a symbol instantly recognisable to any man in the galaxy.

  Sigart.

  ‘Brothers!’ Sigart strode into the operations chamber, heavily muscled arms spread wide as though to embrace the three of his brother aspirants at once. His grin was almost as broad. ‘Did I just feel the scholam kill Stronos?’

  ‘Just singed his pride a little,’ Barras grunted.

  ‘Nowhere he feels pain then.’

  Thecian masked a perfect smile behind his hand, but he did not speak. He seldom spoke, unless spoken to.

  ‘I will improve next time,’ Stronos growled.

  ‘Meditate on what you have learned,’ said Yuriel, and the five aspirants quietened down and looked respectfully up. ‘Each of you. You will be tested again very soon. Ave Omnissiah.’ The Space Marines aped the gesture, the sacred cog formed from both hands across the chest, and the accompanying refrain ‘Ave Omnissiah’, but only Stronos did so with heart.

  Sigart regarded him with an appraising look, as though seeing something he approved of. Stronos was about to ask what it was, but the Omnissiah’s great schema had ordained the rapprochement to be brief.

  ‘Brothers?’ Baraquiel’s voice echoed from the master vox, ringing with a hollow clarity now that the smoke was being drawn from the augmitter array. ‘I am still trapped down here.’

  The scholam spirit turned its myriad forms of attention inwards. Stronos could feel its gloating.

  ‘Brothers?’

  Magos Phi began to cackle.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Do not stare at the skitarius…’

  – Logi-Legatus Nicco Palpus

  I

  Melitan Yolanis’ breath caught as the elevator began to slow. She didn’t know why. Probably because pretending to be a fully fledged magos in person was a great deal different from pretending to be one in long-range correspondence. Sweat was starting to collect under her palms, and she had to fight down the urge to feel that the dummy implants encrusting her f
ace were still there. Her mechadendrite twitched, nervously. Or maybe it wasn’t anything to do with that at all. Maybe because whatever lay on the other side of the bronze doors couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation she had been putting on it since she had been a girl. And she was afraid. Omnissiah, yes. She was more than just a little afraid.

  ‘Omnissiah forgive this trespass,’ she whispered, forming the blessed cog and hugging it to her breast as the boxcar eased onto its magnetic buffers with the almost imperceptible bump of precision engineering and flawless maintenance rites. ‘By your will. Your will is the schema. The schema is my action.’ She felt every field fluctuation and resonance anomaly that wobbled through the floor of the car, awesomely aware of the hand of the Omnissiah holding her above a plunging descent on a cushion of magnetic repulsion.

  It would take nothing at all for Him to withdraw that favour.

  The cherub servitor that levitated incongruously by her shoulder chattered to the door mechanism in short bursts of binaric cipher. The mummified foetus hovered vaguely on the spot, archaic anti-gravitics fizzing and popping from between its in-curled legs. A thumb-sized lens of blue spinel distended one eye socket. The other was stapled shut. As was its mouth. As was its nose.

  The unborn child would have been precious to someone once. She wondered who.

  She could still remember what it had felt like to be fascinated by such technologies. Before her hair had fallen out and her gums had been poisoned and her lungs had turned black. With an innocence that was the preserve of the very, very, young, she’d thought she could know it all. She’d been four, maybe five years old when her parents had taken her to the crypts beneath the Callivant Forge-Temple. The stones had been old. Twelve thousand years, the magos preservator had told her. The air had felt older. She had felt the power in it, a vibration in her stomach, the taste of iron and excitement in her mouth. Even in the dark she had gawped at the arcane assemblage of coils and pipes and magnets and valves that had constituted the divine wonder of The Princeps, the great plasmic organ of House Callivant. The instrument had been, the magos preservator had told her, a gift from Magos Xanthus of the 52nd Expedition Fleet in commemoration of the world’s return to the Martian fold.