The Voice of Mars Read online

  He looked up groggily with his flesh eye, while his bionic glitched as if haywired.

  ‘Two failures in one day,’ said Barras, the frozen articulations in his gauntlet cracking as they re-clenched into a fist. ‘You must be overcome with shame.’

  ‘That is enough, Aspirant Barras.’

  Magos Instructor Yuriel Phi stood on the other side of the table, robed and hooded, her cable-dreadlocks spilling down her chest. She was an elfin figure up close, barely a hundred and fifty centimetres in height, flat-chested, slender, her hands silvery and small, but there was a force to her that ensured that Thecian, Sigart and Baraquiel had all withdrawn a respectful distance.

  ‘Honour is satisfied,’ she said.

  ‘Is it?’ Barras turned to Stronos.

  Stronos managed a nod. What was honour anyway?

  ‘You are the superior fighter,’ he said, flatly.

  Barras snorted, as if saying nothing was better than stating the obvious, but offered a hand and helped drag the Iron Hand’s spark-fizzling bulk to his feet. ‘A good fight, though. I would like to fight you again some day, if you are willing.’

  As if there was any logic to engaging a demonstrably superior opponent. If only he had taken the effort to know his fellow aspirants before agreeing to fight one of them.

  There was something to what Lydriik had tried to teach him after all.

  ‘Of course he’s willing!’ shouted Baraquiel, thumping on the table.

  ‘Good.’ Barras’ expression settled into its usual etched frown. With little else to work from, Stronos had no option but to assume that the Knight of Dorn meant what he said.

  ‘I really thought Stronos might beat him,’ said Thecian, wistfully.

  ‘We have thirty years of this yet,’ said Sigart. ‘One of us is bound to best him eventually.’ Thecian offered the Black Templar a raised fist in salute, which Baraquiel caught, clasped between both of his hands, and then drew the Exsanguinator into a back-thumping embrace.

  Such brotherhood. Where did it come from, Stronos wondered? From which genhanced organ did it manifest, and what mis-code of Ferrus’ seed meant that Stronos could merely observe and feel nothing?

  ‘Come,’ said Magos Phi, turning away. ‘It is time.’ Thecian and the others immediately bowed their heads and made to fall in behind her for the procession to evening prayers. She glanced back over her shoulder, eye twinkling between red and blue from behind a fall of dark cabling. ‘Just Kardan.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘It is difficult to keep secrets in the Eye.’

  – Logi-Legatus Nicco Palpus

  I

  The file descriptors were starting to blur together.

  Lydriik let the data-slate slip through his fingers, collapsing the untidy pile that had been building on the scrivener’s bench, and pinched his eyes, ignoring the nervous shushing that echoed from the direction of the prime archivist’s podium. He tilted his head back, blinking quickly, feeling his eyes relax as his focus fled into the ceiling’s blackwork frescos. He could hear the wind groaning against the domed roof, and for some reason that was soothing too. With a sigh of quiet capitulation, he slumped back over the bench, picked up the slate, elbows spread, and forced himself to read the opening line.

  It was a compilation of sensorum logs, drawn from the Medusa IV perimeter fleets, orbital compliance vessels and the transorbital control hub situated within the old Telesterax ring between time stamps 101412.M41 and 102412.M41. Incoming and outgoing ships were filed by name, numeric registry, manifest and lengthy ordinate strings related to auspex and augur reads taken by the recording ship at the time. With a groan, he sank fully to the bench. Slates shifted under his forehead, little plastek grubs wriggling away from their hateful mother.

  Medusa’s population was a continuously fluctuating estimate, varying between five hundred thousand and two million depending on the severity of the climate and internecine strife. There were ghetto districts of Imperial cities that held more souls than Medusa.

  Even given the significant pull-factor of the Iron Hands war fleets and the Basilikon Astra, the amount of void-traffic it received daily was staggering.

  Lydriik was starting to feel he had not protested this assignment quite strenuously enough.

  Trying to find even the official destination point of the million-or-so technological artefacts evacuated from Thennos post-compliance was like trying to track the path of a thought through his own head. Xenos artefacts accrued over eight thousand years of Martian rule had been shipped off-world over a matter of days, all at the exact same time that tens of thousands of skitarii legionaries from the Hadd forge world in the Golgenna Reach were arriving to secure the compliance. He had successfully tracked a consignment of eldar grav-tank parts across three segmenta to Ryza, and even located the import dockets confirming their receipt. He had followed chains of Iron Hands and merchant vessels, tracing their cargo handover to handover to their destinations on dozens of disparate worlds.

  Locating the destination port or ports for the Dawnbreak Technology should have been a simple enough task. There could not have been more than a hundred worlds in the entire Imperium with Inquisitorial license to handle and trade in xenos technologies. It was the sheer volume of shipping, the near-impenetrable machine argot of the Sthenelic merchant clans, and the deliberately obtuse Mechanicus logister codes that made it feel like looking for orbiting debris around a distant sun.

  He rubbed his eyes and picked up another slate.

  He had started in the Librarius archives, within the confines of the Astropathica sanctuary in the outer fortifications of the Telesterax. He was respected there, and the Librarians of the Iron Hands had always been a breed apart. Many originated from foreign worlds, as Lydriik himself did, bartered from the Black Ships as they passed through the Iron Hands’ loose diaspora of client conquests. Whether it was for that reason or the organic basis of their mental powers, they tended to be uncommonly attached to their flesh.

  From there, he had made the perilous descent by Storm Eagle, piercing Medusa’s seething storm systems to set down before the fortress of ironglass that served as the Chaplaincy’s basilica upon the great mesa of Karaashi. With gifts and tokens of future aid from the Lord Librarian Antal Haraar, the Father of Iron had grudgingly permitted Lydriik supervised access to his vaults.

  They had held nothing of relevance.

  He had bartered the Storm Eagle for one of the Iron Chaplains’ Rhinos, the attrition rates suffered by Medusan aeronautica being equivalent to that experienced by combat squadrons, and with it criss-crossed half of Medusa’s primary landmass. He had gone as supplicant to the Land Behemoths of the Morlaag, Sorrgol, Haarmek and Kaargul clans, traded favours owing to the Chapter Librarius and to Inquisitor Yazir, all for a few days with their data troves. There was always a slim chance that some clan’s ship had sniffed something untoward.

  But no.

  He sighed.

  The Council archives had always been his best chance at finding where the Dawnbreak Technology had been moved. He had known that since Harsid had released him from his tithe of service, but it was one he had preferred to avoid while other avenues remained open.

  He glanced up from his stack of slates and scanned the archive chamber warily.

  The human servants of the Eye of Medusa moved quietly through the great data stacks. With diligence, they filed, ordered, polished, catalogued, copied, restored, loaded carts with requested collections and wheeled them for the equerry-servitors of Iron Fathers and High Priests to convey. Even when they passed out of view behind a stack or into a study annexe, Lydriik could see them, tiny soul-fires guttering in sconces of pale flesh and plain cloth. He knew each of their names, what they were doing, where they were going, who they most loved, what they most feared.

  The human soul, it transpired, was less complicated than Adeptus Mechanicus files of
lading, even when looked on in passing.

  It was one such ember-glow, rather than the scuff of sandal leather on the diorite flags, that forewarned Lydriik of the archivist coming to unload a fresh stack of documents. With a sigh, Lydriik cleared a space and gestured for the man to set them down. With the barest tremor to betray his mortal terror the archivist hurriedly, but with tremendous care, transferred the pyramid of crisp, newly scribed parchment scrolls from cart to bench. He bowed again, and fled, the wheels of his trolley clattering, his spirit spasming with the purples and reds of a hunted mammal. Lydriik smiled indulgently as he unrolled the uppermost scroll. Space Marines were infrequent visitors to the archives. Few Iron Hands even knew they existed. And no man of sound mind could ever be comfortable in the presence of an Alpha-grade psyker.

  With a deep breath, he leant in and started reading.

  He had been scanning the documents for about forty-five minutes when a crawling sensation took up in the middle of his forehead. As if he were observed. He glanced up over the curling parchment, and almost crushed it in his hand.

  The Helfather stood on the other side of the bench, as still as a three-metre-high engraving of a Terminator-armoured ancient. The age-dulled plate was eerily silent, bereft of the usual sounds of power generation and life support that usually accompanied so heavily augmented a warrior. A human soul did not so much as flicker. He was dark to Lydriik’s mind, it was like looking at a wall. His lenses too were unlit, the same scuffed black as the helmet, but Lydriik could feel the weight of something’s attention on his brow.

  Lydriik lowered the scroll lest he damage it, and with a stiff hand smoothed it flat.

  What he wanted to do was push himself as far from the Helfather as he could make it in one movement, but one did not rise to become Prime Librarian of Clan Borrgos without supreme self-control.

  ‘Please,’ said Nicco Palpus. ‘Do not allow me to disturb you, Epistolary.’

  The gaunt frame of Nicco Palpus, the Paramount Voice of Mars, emerged from behind the Helfather’s stolid bulk. His robes were rich with the sigil-wiring of high office, but his face, for a priest of his status, was remarkably human. Lydriik peered through the soft metallic glaze of his eyes to the old soul within. It was a curious mosaic of pieces, as if the logi-legatus had been assembled in stages over many hundreds of years. Lydriik brushed the priest’s surface thoughts, skimming an endlessly looping mantra of ones and zeros. Drawing his mind back, he became aware of the priest’s eyes quietly clicking, his milquetoast expression melting and reshaping into something other. Seeing his own studied resolve, hints of tension in the muscles about the eyes, reflected back at him, Lydriik supressed a shiver.

  When Harsid and Yazir had dispatched him on this assignment, he had insisted that thirty minutes alone with Nicco Palpus was all he needed to see the mission done.

  Thirty seconds in, Lydriik was not sure who was reading who.

  ‘I did not realise I had announced my presence,’ he said, keeping his voice low, while Nicco Palpus summoned a stool and sat, drawing his robes into his lap. Lydriik’s eyes flicked to the Helfather, still standing, sightlessly watching.

  It had not moved.

  ‘Lips open. Molecules bump together. Word travels. Such is the workings of the Omnissiah’s universe. It is difficult to keep secrets in the Eye.’ Palpus’ smile shimmered, like moonlight behind a cloud. ‘But not impossible.’

  ‘Perhaps you can help me unravel one,’ said Lydriik.

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘Secrets and lies are anathema to the Omnissiah, after all.’

  The logi-legatus’ smile broadened. ‘A commonly misused tenet, for nothing known to one is unknown to the Omnissiah. Thus, there are no secrets. Never challenge me to a debate on theism, Epistolary.’

  Lydriik dipped his head in concession of the point.

  ‘You are seeking the Thennosian archeotech. I believe Kristos still refers to it as the Dawnbreak Technology.’ Palpus’ smile evaporated. ‘Why?’

  ‘I think you know why.’

  ‘Your mistress has some authority, but this is Medusa, the Iron Council are seldom impressed by agents they can break with one hand, regardless of the symbol they wear.’

  Lydriik frowned, picking up on a strained unease within the Voice of Mars’ thoughts. He leaned forwards, highly aware of the Helfather looming over the bench, determining to lean on that thought and see what pressure it could bear. ‘Yazir will not stop searching, you know that. This is Kristos’ obsession. It would be easier for you to cooperate, in the long run.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Palpus’ expression reformed into one of smiling munificence. ‘Tell me what you already have, and maybe I can fill in the blanks for you. As a gesture of my cooperation.’

  Lydriik licked his lips.

  ‘How fares Jorgirr Shidd?’ Palpus asked, amiably.

  Lydriik found himself recalling the red jump-suited tech-crew that had received his Storm Eagle at the Chaplaincy basilica, the data-savant that had roused his terminal and even the servitor that had escorted him to the deeper vaults. He shook his head. Trying to speculate on what the Voice of Mars knew and from where was pointless. Better to simply assume that he knew everything, and that anyone wearing the Cog Mechanicus was potentially listening – whether their minds were aware of it or not.

  ‘Still not dead,’ he answered, carefully.

  Palpus nodded as though this were news. ‘He seldom visits Meduson, even for the Iron Moon.’

  ‘The Father of Iron has little business to conduct in the Eye. The Chaplaincy has no voice on the Iron Council.’

  ‘Very true,’ Palpus conceded. ‘As it is with the Librarius.’

  Lydriik bit back a response of the flesh. ‘Quite.’

  ‘And what information does Shidd hold within the Ice Pinnacle?’ Palpus’ attention strayed towards the documents spread out between them. ‘And the recordists of the Morlaag, Sorrgol, Haarmek and Kaargul clans, what knowledge were they able to provide?’ His fingers alighted on a slate and began to turn it towards him. With transhuman reflexes and a shadow of the Emperor’s gift for premonition, Lydriik’s hand shot out, swallowing the priest’s and pinning it to the bench. Their eyes met. Palpus’ flicked towards the Helfather.

  It still had not moved.

  Lydriik let go.

  The logi-legatus left his hand where it lay for a moment, watching Lydriik, then picked up the slate and sat back. He did not bother to look at it.

  ‘Don’t play games,’ Lydriik hissed. ‘You know what I’m looking for.’

  ‘I know. And as Mars’ voice and custodian of the Iron Hands, I choose to deny you.’ He looked Lydriik up and down and sneered. ‘Like children, you have no concept of danger.’

  Lydriik rose angrily from his chair. ‘We are Adeptus Astartes.’

  ‘Your infantile emotional range is housed in the bodies of gods. You are weapons built to do violence in the Emperor’s name. What free will you possess is an illusion, and be thankful, for the Iron Tenth would have driven itself to annihilation millennia ago if not for the gracious hand of Mars.’

  Lydriik was speechless. He gaped as Nicco Palpus stood and smoothed out his robes.

  ‘The data will all be here somewhere,’ he said. ‘Does the Scriptorum­ of Iron not warn us against deleting anything, lest it later be revealed to have value?’

  A smirk crossed Palpus’ features, swiftly masked. ‘Indeed it does.’ He nodded farewell, making to leave, only to then turn back as though remembering something he had meant to say. ‘I understand that Iron Captain Raan has just made planetfall on Manga Unine.’

  Lydriik nodded. He had heard the news. Manga Unine was a sprawling campaign, decades old, and a war of attrition against an endemic xeno species called the Calx that several million Imperial Guardsmen and eleven Chapters of Adeptus Astartes had not been able to finish.

 
It also just happened to be on the other side of the galaxy.

  ‘The Calculus is the Calculus,’ said Palpus, apparently reading Lydriik’s thoughts more precisely than the Librarian could the priest’s. ‘With the Raukaan and Garrsak clans already dispatched elsewhere, and Clan Vurgaan taking their turn of garrison duty here on Medusa, the Borrgos were the only clan in fit state to respond to the call.’

  ‘A call we have been ignoring for twenty years,’ said Lydriik.

  ‘The iron captain may well require the presence of his Prime Librarian. I would not be surprised if you were to be recalled to front-line duties soon. Congratulations, Epistolary.’ He dipped his head again and turned to leave. ‘We should all do what we are made to do.’

  Lydriik glanced up at the Helfather.

  ‘Do you ever wonder why they never talk?’ he murmured, as much to himself as to the logi-legatus.

  Palpus looked over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps they simply never talk to you.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Quantitatively my favourite xenos breed.’

  – Iron Captain Draevark

  I

  Rauth could make out the void fight at the system’s limits with the naked eye. The crackle of ship deaths and ordnance detonations lit up a narrow window of the stellar horizon. An informed observer could glean a lot from those explosions. The brilliant white burn of iridium-tipped torpedoes. The more silver-white of cobalt, from the Mort XIII forge world, most likely, its crust long depleted of the harder, more valuable, transition element. That would be the Beacon of Terra. Its twisting path through the sacred sites of Cyclopoea brought the strike cruiser regularly into orbit with that world. Void shield discharge presented an intermittent, electrical flicker. Brown-shifted blooms of ferric iron and unrefined promethium marked the demise of alien ships. The bulk of the combined Imperial fleets was holding anchorage over Fabris Callivant. Their formation was solid, the upper orbital bands bristling with battleship broadsides and the fixed aegis of defensive platforms. But the Hospitallers were not built for holding territory; they were void warriors, reavers and crusaders, line-breakers, and they were determined to reap an early tally from the aliens’ forerunners.