Table of Contents

Cover

Gods of Mars - Extract

Legal

eBook license

Past and future. Then and now. Temporal anchors. Intellectual conceits, they allowed a farseer to cling to the present. Such linear terms had no meaning or place within the skein, but they had their uses. Bielanna fought to cling on to the present as past and future collided, hurling her sight into potentialities that could never come to be and times she had never lived.

Infinite vistas of the psychic landscape surrounded her, golden ocean depths filled with glittering, frond-like threads. Each shone brightly as it flared and was then extinguished, only to be replaced by hundreds more.

A billion times a billion lives lived in the blink of an eye.

And these were just the ones she could see.

She drifted, watching each tightly woven thread split into fractal patterns of innumerable futures as she approached. The skein’s tides were unpredictable at the best of times, and to see one individual destiny was next to impossible.

But that was what she had trained her entire life to do.

Farseers spent centuries reading the skein’s ebb and flow, but not even the greatest were entirely safe from capricious undertows or spiteful squalls. In this place beyond the galaxy, where the warp and weft of space-time were playthings shaped by the will of a madman, it was all too easy to forget that.

Bielanna struggled against the tug of fear, hatred and grief: interleaved emotions that would damn her as surely as relaxing her grip on the thread leading back to her body of flesh and blood.

Fear for the fate of the galaxy should the humans succeed in bringing the Breath of the Gods back to their Imperium.

Hatred for the inhuman black-clad Space Marines who had haunted her visions for years with their crusading zeal.

Grief for daughters she might never know, whose chance to exist was diminished every moment by the blundering actions of Archmagos Kotov and his fleet of explorators.

She closed off that last thought, but not quickly enough.

She heard her daughters’ unborn laughter. Girlish giggles echoing from all around her. Sounds from a future that grew ever more remote. Laughter that mocked her attempts to restore it.

Bielanna’s body of flesh and blood sat in the oil-stained squalor of the Speranza, its foetid, human depths now home to her warriors since the Starblade’s destruction. A tear of loss ran down a porcelain cheek, the emotion so potent it made her shudder.

In the skein, Bielanna fought to control her feelings.

The mon-keigh knew nothing of the universe’s secret workings, and for the briefest moment, she envied them their ignorance. Who but the eldar could mourn lives that had not even been born?

‘I am Bielanna Faerelle, Farseer of Biel-Tan,’ she cried into the oceanic depths. ‘I am master of my soul and I bring only balance in my heart and thoughts.’

Everything in the skein rejected constancy. It sensed her lie. This was a place of dreams and nightmares, where all things were infinite. To give something a name marked it as not of the skein.

And that was dangerous.

It drew things that hid in the cracks between destinies. She saw them ooze from half-glimpsed shadows. That shadows could exist in this realm of absolute light was a measure of their threat. These were not the crystalline web-forms of warp spiders, nor yet the glimmer of future echoes moving from potential to reality.

These were things twisted out of true by the tortured nature of space-time beyond the galaxy’s edge. They defied the tyranny of form, mere suggestions of grub-like null-spaces that existed only to consume. She moved onwards, far from their questing, sphincter-like mouths and blind, idiot hunger.

The Lost Magos, known as Telok to the mon-keigh, had torn the flesh of the galaxy asunder. The things in the cracks were growing ever more numerous as that wound pulled wider.

Worse, the damage was spreading from the material universe into the skein. Already Telok’s violations were cutting threads like a blind weaver’s blade.

Unchecked, it would destroy the future of everything.

Everything about Archmagos Telok’s gigantic form screamed threat. The jutting, angular protrusions of razor-edged crystal growths encrusting his oversized limbs. The brutal angles of his piston-driven Dreadnought frame. His entire aspect spoke to the primal part of Roboute Surcouf’s brain that had kept his species alive since his distant ancestors first walked upright.

The part that screamed, run!

And yet the face beneath the ragged hood was smiling in welcome.

Telok’s skin was waxy and unhealthy looking, but that was nothing unusual for adepts of the Mechanicus. Too much time locked in their forges under the glare of bare lumens gave them all an unhealthy complexion. The archmagos had glassy eyes that were wide and enthusiastic, the mirror of his smile.

But like his eyes, the smile looked artificial.

Telok’s forge world – Exnihlio, he’d called it – was unlike anything Roboute had ever seen, and he’d seen a great deal of the strangest things the galaxy had to offer. With a Letter of Marque (genuine now, thanks to Archmagos Kotov) he’d traversed the galaxy from side to side as a devil-may-care rogue trader.

He’d seen pinnacle-spired hives straddling volcanic chasms, vine-hung settlements the size of continents and subterranean arcologies that were as light and airy as any surface metropolis. He’d done business on orbital junkyards that served as off-world slums, been welcomed by Imperial commanders who dwelled undersea, and plied his trade with feral tribal chiefs who established cargo cults in his wake.

No aspect of Exnihlio’s surface owed a debt to aesthetics, simply to functionality. Much like the Speranza, the mighty Ark Mechanicus that had brought them beyond the edges of known space. This region appeared, at first glance, to be a power generation district. The air was bitterly metallic, like biting on a copper Imperial, and reeked of petrochemical burn-off.

Monolithic structures of dark iron and cyclopean stone towered on all sides, standing cheek by jowl with crisp spires of steel and glass. Traceries of lightning forked into a sky of painfully vivid blue electrical storms, and distant cooling towers belched caustic vapours. The cliff-like facades of the enormous buildings gave no clue as to their exact purpose, but they throbbed with powerful industry and the roar of infernal furnaces.

A thousands-strong, crystalline army of warriors filled the plaza in which their Thunderhawk sat with its engines growling. They stood like glassy sculptures of Space Marines arrayed for battle before their Chapter Master.

Sergeant Tanna of the Black Templars, gigantic in his ebon plate, followed the two archmagi with his crusaders spread to either side. They watched the crystal-forms with open hostility. A force of such things had killed their brother on Katen Venia, and the Black Templars were an unforgiving Chapter.

Though Telok had welcomed Archmagos Kotov and his entourage, Tanna’s hand never strayed from his bolter’s grip, and the white-helmed Varda kept his fingers tightly wrapped around the handle of his enormous black sword.

Colonel Ven Anders and his storm troopers drew up the rear. Following the Templars’ example, each soldier clutched his hellgun tight to his chest and kept a finger across the trigger guard.

But behind the discipline, Roboute saw their amazement.

They’d probably not seen anything like this.

None of us has.

Distant electrical fire raged in a troposphere of bruised hues, and the hideous illumination left a clenched fist of vertigo in Roboute’s gut. He swallowed a mouthful of bile. One of Colonel Anders’s men spat onto the metalled roadway. Clearly Roboute wasn’t alone in feeling discomfort, seeing the man cast an uneasy glance at the approaching storm.

‘How bad must it be for a soldier of Cadia to feel unsettled?’ he muttered.

‘Sylkwood could give you a better answer,’ said Magos Pavelka at Roboute’s side, entranced by the structures arrayed before them. ‘She is from Cadia, and understands that gloomy mindset better than most.’

‘So what are they saying?’ asked Roboute, nodding to the head of their procession, where Telok and Kotov spoke in blurts of binary. Both adepts had dispensed with their flesh-voices, though it was clear their attempts to communicate were not progressing as smoothly as either expected.

Pavelka’s head ever so slightly inclined to the side.

‘Ilanna?’ said Roboute, when she didn’t immediately answer.

‘Archmagos Telok is speaking in a binaric form long since considered obsolete,’ said Pavelka eventually.

‘Isn’t binary the same throughout the galaxy?’ asked Roboute. ‘Isn’t that the point of a language based on mathematics?’

‘Archmagos Telok’s binary is a parse-form with which current generation Mechanicus augmitters are not reverse-compatible. They are being forced to communicate in an extremely primitive form of source code.’

‘If binary’s a problem, why not just speak in Gothic?’

‘Even a primitive form of source code carries more specificity of meaning than verbal communications.’

‘Oh,’ said Roboute with mock affront. ‘Well pardon me.’

‘You asked,’ said Pavelka.

Their path was leading to a colossal hangar-structure with a vaulted silver-steel roof and glittering masts at its four corners, the same building from which the titanic glass scorpion construct had emerged. The great gateway had been subsumed back into the enormous structure, but a smaller portal now opened and from it slid a crystal vessel like those that once plied the oceans of Terra.

A blade-prowed brigantine with sails of billowing glass that caught the sky’s light and threw it back in dazzling rainbows. A hundred metres long and formed from what looked like a single piece of translucent crystal, its hull was threaded with squirming light and shimmering reflections.

‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ whispered Pavelka, her hands unconsciously forming the Martian cog across her chest.

The vessel skimmed a metre above the ground, a ship of the line that needed no sea to glide upon, no wind to fill its sails.

Roboute had never seen anything quite so wondrous. The crystal ship was a thing of exquisite beauty, something unique in the truest sense of the word. It made no sound other than a soft hiss, as though knifing through serene waters.

‘Indulgent, I know, but the nano-machines work best when creating things of beauty or things of terror,’ said Telok, switching back to his flesh-voice as the ship coasted to a halt behind him.

Roboute’s eyes followed the sleek curves of the ship’s graceful hull as a number of steps of solid glass extruded to allow access onto the deck.

Telok extended one of his elephantine arms and gestured to the steps, but only Archmagos Kotov and his skitarii guards moved towards them.

‘Why do we need transport?’ asked Tanna, stepping forwards to stand alongside Kotov. ‘If we are to travel far, why did you have us land here?’

Telok’s waxen features didn’t change, but Roboute saw irritation in his eyes. ‘When an entire planet’s resources are engaged in the generation of power there are sizeable regions where the atmosphere is aggressively toxic to those who do not enjoy the fearsome augmentations of Adeptus Astartes physiology. My sanctum sanctorum lies within such a region.’

Telok turned and gestured to the immobile army of crystalline warriors.

‘My world is home to many technologies unknown within the Imperium, and the unknown always carries the threat of danger to those not versed in its mysteries, don’t you agree?’

Roboute couldn’t help but hear the stress Telok put on the my, and felt a twitch at the unconscious display of ego. The Lost Magos had been lost for so long that he couldn’t help showing off the wonders and miracles of his world. What other psychological effects might thousands of years of isolation have fostered?

‘The only danger I see here is the use of technology that has already killed one of my men,’ said Tanna.

‘Ah, yes, of course, you are referring to the tragic death of your Apothecary on the world Master Surcouf named Katen Venia,’ said Telok, displaying an impressive knowledge of things he had not been told.

‘A terrible loss, yes,’ agreed Kotov, placing a silvered hand on Tanna’s shoulder guard. A hand that was swiftly removed when the Black Templars sergeant glared at him.

‘I deeply and profoundly regret the death of your battle-brother, Sergeant Tanna,’ said Telok. ‘The crystaliths were emplaced to defend against any interference with the Stellar Primogenitor’s work. I’m afraid your arrival on Katen Venia triggered their autonomic threat response.’

‘Your regret is meaningless,’ said Tanna.

‘I am sorry you feel that way, but you have it anyway.’

Kotov and his entourage of skitarii and flunkies climbed onto the ship, eager to be on their way. Tanna and the Black Templars followed them aboard, the floating ship sinking not so much as a millimetre at the increased weight.

‘After you,’ said Anders as his Cadians moved up to the ship.

Roboute nodded and climbed the glass steps to the deck. The gunwale was smooth and apparently without seams, as though the vessel had been grown from one enormous crystal. Its twin masts soared overhead and the billowing sheets of glass were dazzling with refracted light.

A single raised lectern at the vessel’s stern appeared to be the only means of control, and Kotov examined it with the eagerness of a neophyte priest. His skitarii stood to either side of him at the gunwales, facing outwards, as though expecting to repel boarders.

‘Go look,’ said Roboute to Pavelka. ‘I know you want to.’

Pavelka nodded and gratefully made her way down the deck towards the archmagos and the control lectern. Anders and his men came next, followed at last by Archmagos Telok.

‘I have you to thank for bringing the Speranza here,’ said the hulking form of the archmagos. ‘You found the Tomioka’s saviour beacon, and for that you have my gratitude.’

Roboute looked up into Telok’s unnatural face. It revolted him, but given it was thousands of years old, what else should he expect?

‘I’m beginning to wonder about that,’ said Roboute.

‘About what?’

‘Whether it was me that brought us here at all.’

‘Of course you did,’ said Telok, moving down the deck with a booming laugh. ‘Who else could have done so?’

Roboute didn’t answer as the ship moved off like a whisper.

Speranza.

Ark Mechanicus.

Its name meant hope in an ancient tongue of Old Earth, and had been aptly chosen, for within the starship’s monstrously vast form it carried the last remnants of ancient knowledge thought lost for all time. That those aboard were ignorant of the secrets hidden within its forgotten datacores and dusty sepulchre temples was an irony known only to the vast spirit at its heart.

The Speranza orbited Exnihlio with stately grace, a void-capable colossus, a forge world set loose among the stars. Its hull was a kilometres-long agglomeration of steel and stone, studded with mighty forges, vast cathedrals of the Omnissiah, and workshops beyond count. The power of its industry could sustain a system-wide campaign of war, its crew a planetary assault.

Not even those whose genius had set it among the stars could claim to call it beautiful, but beauty had never been their aim. The Ark Mechanicus was a ship destined to carry the great works of the first techno-theologians to the farthest corners of the galaxy, to reclaim and reveal all that had been lost in the terror of Old Night.

A crusading vessel, a repository of hard-won knowledge and an icon of hope all in one. And like any object of hope, it had its followers. Its fleet was reduced now after the nightmarish crossing of the Halo Scar and an attack by eldar pirates, but it was still formidable.

The twin Gothic-class cruisers, Moonchild and Wrathchild, described Möbius patrol circuits around the Speranza, while the solitary Endurance-class cruiser, Mortis Voss, pushed ahead of the fleet, lashing the void with aggressive auspex sweeps.

Attached to the Kotov Fleet to repay a Debita Fabricata, the two sister vessels of Mortis Voss were dead. Only it remained to return to Voss Prime with word of all it had seen and done.

Tens of thousands filled the multitude of decks within the Speranza like blood in the arteries of a living leviathan. Its bondsmen fed its fiery heart, its tech-priests tempered its tempestuous spirits and the archmagos guided its quest into the unknown.

The dynamic between the Speranza’s masters and servants had changed markedly over the course of the vessel’s journey to Exnihlio. Where once its Mechanicus overlords had been little better than slavers, now they were forced into a compact of respect by the actions of a truly unique individual.

A Machine-touched bondsman named Abrehem Locke.

The lowest decks of the Speranza were the areas of greatest danger for its crew: either through radiation-leaks, spiteful machine-spirits or the more recent ship-board rumour of a ghost-faced assassin stalking the ship’s underbelly.

Right now, Abrehem Locke would have gladly faced any of those dangers rather than walk into Forge Elektrus. Its approaches were lit by stuttering lumen globes and throbbed with ill-tempered spirits. Abrehem’s augmetic eyes caught the glitchy code as it sparked invisibly behind the sagging iron plates of the walls.

They weren’t welcome here.

‘This is a bad idea,’ he said. ‘A really bad idea. Hawke was right, I shouldn’t have come here.’

‘Since when has anything Julius Hawke said ever been a good idea?’ answered Totha Mu-32.

Totha Mu-32 had once been Abrehem’s overseer, but the extraordinary events of the last few months had seen the dynamics of that relationship change in ways Abrehem still couldn’t quite grasp. At times Totha Mu-32 behaved like his devotee, at others, a nurturing mentor.

But sometimes it just felt like he was still his overseer.

‘Good point,’ said Abe. ‘But in this case, I happen to agree with him. They’re never going to accept me.’

‘You are Machine-touched,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘And it is time you took your first steps along this road.’

‘They won’t accept me,’ repeated Abrehem.

‘They will, they all know what you did, even the demodes. They all know the power you have.’

‘That wasn’t me,’ said Abe. ‘That was Ismael. Tell him.’

The third member of their group shook his head.

Previous to Totha Mu-32, Ismael de Roeven had once been Abrehem’s overseer on Joura. Ismael had run a lifter-rig, a powerful beast named Savickas, but that had come to an end when he, Abrehem, Coyne and Hawke had been swept up by the collarmen and pressed into service aboard the Speranza.

The Mechanicus turned Ismael into a mindless servitor, but a violent head injury had restored a measure of his memories. No one quite knew how that had happened or what else had come back, for Ismael was now something else, far beyond a servitor, but not entirely human either.

‘We did that together, Abrehem,’ said Ismael. ‘We are the divine spark and the omega point. Without one, the other cannot exist. I allowed the servitors to lay down their tools, but without you there would have been no impetus to do so.’

These days, Ismael always sounded like he was reading from a sermon book.

‘I think I liked you better as a servitor,’ Abrehem muttered.

Then they were at the door to Forge Elektrus, a battered cog-toothed circle with a bas-relief cybernetic skull icon of the Mechanicus at its centre. Drizzles of oil stained the skull, making it look as though it wept for those condemned within.

Totha Mu-32 placed his staff against the entry panel. Abrehem saw the overseer’s code signifiers strain against the locking mechanism, attempting to open the door without success. Staring straight at the skull above the door, Totha Mu-32 allowed the subdermal electoo of the dragon to come to the surface of his organics.

‘Does this serve me any better, Chiron?’ he said.

‘You are not welcome here, Totha,’ said a grating voice from the augmitter mounted in the jaw of a grinning skull above the door. It looked like a freshly bleached skull, and Abrehem wondered to whom it had once belonged.

‘Probably the last person who thought coming here was a good idea,’ he whispered under his breath.

Totha Mu-32 held out his staff as the glittering image of the dragon faded back into his pale skin.

‘You do not have the right to deny me access,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Your rank is inferior to mine by a decimal place.’

‘No thanks to you,’ said the voice. ‘And it’s Adept Manubia to you. Your rank permits you entry to Elektrus, though Omnissiah knows why you’d ever want to slum it here, but it’s the company you keep that’s giving me pause.’

‘They are with me,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Both have more than earned the right to venture within a forge.’

‘You don’t really believe that or you wouldn’t have waited until Kotov went down to the planet’s surface,’ barked the skull.

‘I do believe it, and you know why I have come here.’

‘I’m not teaching him,’ said Adept Manubia via the skull. ‘I’d be dismantled and have my augments implanted into waste servitors.’

‘And that would be a terrible shame, because you’re making such valuable use of them here,’ said Totha Mu-32, displaying a capacity for spite Abrehem hadn’t suspected.

The skull fell silent, and Abrehem wondered if Totha Mu-32 had pressed Adept Manubia too hard. He turned to the Mechanicus overseer, but the cog-toothed door rolled aside before he could speak. The waft of hot metal and blessed oil that had been run through recyc-filters too many times to be healthy gusted out.

A magos in stained crimson robes barred entry to the forge. One hand held a staff topped with a laurel wreath and carved representations of slain leporids. The adept’s hood was pulled back, revealing a face that was largely organic and also extremely attractive.

The voice from the skull had given no clue as to the speaker’s sex, and Abrehem had made the dismissive assumption that Magos Chiron Manubia would be male.

‘Totha,’ she said.

‘Chiron,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘It’s been too long.’

‘You’ve always known where I was,’ said Manubia, and Abrehem sensed shared history between them. Anywhere else, he’d have said this was a meeting of ex-lovers, but he couldn’t quite picture that between these two.

He didn’t want to picture that.

The Mechanicus forbade liaisons between its adepts; was that why Chiron Manubia laboured in a lowly forge below the waterline?

‘You want me to train him?’ she said. ‘After what happened on Karis Cephalon? You must think I’m an idiot.’

‘Quite the opposite, Chiron,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘That’s why I’m here. I can think of nowhere better for Abrehem.’

Chiron Manubia turned her gaze upon Abrehem. Her appraisal was frank and unimpressed.

‘He doesn’t look Machine-touched,’ said Manubia. ‘Apart from that clunky-looking augmetic arm, he looks like just any other scrawny bondsman.’

Abrehem wasn’t offended. He knew she was dead right to think he didn’t look like much.

‘How can you say that after what happened in orbit around Hypatia?’ asked Totha Mu-32.

‘If it was really him that did that, then I’m even less inclined to allow him anywhere near my forge.’

‘Aren’t you even the slightest bit curious? Don’t you want to be immortalised as the adept who inducted him into the mysteries? It could restore your standing within the Mechanicus.’

‘A standing you helped ruin.’

At least Totha Mu-32 had the decency to look ashamed.

‘I know what I did, Chiron, but look on this as my attempt to undo that youthful mistake,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Take him on for a day, and if you don’t see any potential in him, throw whatever’s left back to me.’

‘One day?’

‘Not a pico-second more,’ agreed Totha Mu-32.

Adept Manubia took a step back and gestured within the forge with her laurel-topped staff. In the gloom behind her, Abrehem could see dark engines of oiled iron and hissing vents like grinning jaws. A miasma of broken code snapped and squalled from every machine.

It had the look and feel of a wounded animal’s lair.

‘Welcome to Forge Elektrus, Abrehem Locke,’ she said. ‘Are you ready to take the first step to becoming Cult Mechanicus?’

‘Honestly? I’m not sure,’ answered Abrehem.

‘Wrong answer,’ said Chiron Manubia, hauling him inside.

The crystal ship skimmed across the plaza to where three avenues led deeper into the city. Telok guided them like a steersman of old, as Roboute sat on a bench extruded from the hull at his approach.

He rested his elbow on the gunwale, and the material moulded itself to the contours of his limb. It felt warm, and he lifted his arm away. The surface reshaped to its original form, and a glowing impression of Roboute’s fingers and palm remained, slowly fading as he watched.

‘You’re a well-travelled man, Master Surcouf,’ said Ven Anders, balancing his rifle across his knees as he took a seat next to Roboute. ‘Have you seen anything like this ship?’

‘Call me Roboute, and no, I haven’t.’

‘Not even among the eldar?’

Roboute shook his head. ‘There’s a superficial similarity, yes, but there’s something a little… vulgar about this.’

‘Vulgar? This? It’s beautiful,’ said Anders. ‘Even a dour son of Cadia like me can appreciate that much.’

‘There’s an effortlessness to eldar craftsmanship that no human can match,’ said Roboute. ‘This feels like someone trying too hard to emulate it.’

‘Ordinarily I’d report a man to the commissars for xenos sympathies like that,’ said Anders. ‘But seeing as you’re a scoundrel of a rogue trader, I think I can let you off this time.’

‘Decent of you, Colonel Anders.’

‘Ven,’ said Anders as the shadow of vast, iron-clad structures swallowed them. Both men looked up, turning their attention to the artificial canyon through which the ship sailed. Sheer cliffs of iron soared upwards, ribboned with hundreds of snaking pipes and cable runs. They clung to every building and laced overhead like vines in a rainforest. They thrummed with power.

Squealing pistons, the roar of venting gases and the relentless, grinding crunch of enormous machine gears echoed from all around. Booming hammerblows of distant construction temples and a seismic throb of subterranean labours filled the air. The planet’s heartbeat. Roboute felt his bones vibrate in time with the pulse of worldwide industry.

The ship’s course threaded between monolithic blocks of metallic towers, beneath arches of latticework scaffolds and along curving expressways. On suspended gantries and within those structures open to the elements, Roboute saw innumerable toiling servitors, like ants in a glass-fronted colony.

They were withered things with so little flesh left upon them they were practically automatons. Fettered gangs of them turned great cog-wheels, hauled on enormous chains or climbed grand processional steps in grim lockstep, coming from who knew where to reach their next allotted task.

Was this the crew of the Tomioka?

Labouring alongside the servitors were thousands of the things Telok had called crystaliths. Some retained humanoid form, albeit in a glassy and unfinished fashion, while others adopted whatever bodyplan best suited their current task.

Roboute caught a glimpse of a gigantic crystalith moving between two golden-capped pyramid structures, undulant and centipede-like. Easily the equal of a Reaver Titan in scale.

‘Did you see that?’ said Anders.

‘I did.’

‘Having Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica striding behind us would make me feel a lot better,’ said Roboute.

‘And I wouldn’t say no to Vilka scouting the flanks either,’ said Anders. ‘Have they a new princeps for Amarok yet?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Roboute. ‘Ever since Hypatia, the Legio’s pretty much locked itself away.’

Anders nodded, glancing up as a flaring arc of corposant danced along the structural elements of the adjacent building. Flaring vent towers belched gouts of flame and smoke. Petrochemical stink descended. Flashes of lightning arcing between dirigibles threw shadows on the walls.

‘That storm’s getting nearer,’ said Roboute, squinting through his fingers at the lowering sky. Dark bands of toxin-laden clouds were sinking downwards.

‘Looks that way,’ agreed Ven Anders.

‘You think it’ll be dangerous?’

‘I think everything’s dangerous.’

Roboute laughed, then saw Anders was completely serious.

‘Then let me say that you look very relaxed for a man in a high state of readiness.’

‘That’s the Cadian way,’ said Anders.

No two structures of Exnihlio were alike, and Roboute struggled to ascribe purpose to them. Some had the appearance of forges, others of colossal power stations. Some appeared unfinished, yet more were abandoned or had otherwise fallen into ruin.

Something struck Roboute as odd about the city, something that had been niggling at him ever since they’d landed. The buildings were pure function, very much like the Speranza, but with one important difference. As ugly as the Ark Mechanicus was, it was still unmistakably a vessel of the Martian priesthood, thanks to its wealth of iconography. Cog-toothed skulls, mortis angels, scriptural binary and mechanised frescoes adorned any space not given over to pure practicality.

Part stamp of authority, part theatre, it was impossible for any servant of the Emperor to escape the grim imagery so beloved of Terra and Mars.

‘Where are all the skulls?’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Anders.

‘The skulls,’ repeated Roboute. ‘Since we landed, I haven’t seen a single cogged skull, no symbols of the Mechanicus at all.’

‘And nor will you, Master Surcouf,’ called Telok from the steersman’s lectern. ‘Not while I am master of Exnihlio.’

Roboute turned to face the archmagos. He hadn’t whispered, but neither had he exactly spoken aloud. The city’s din should have easily swallowed Roboute’s words, but perhaps Telok’s aural augmentations allowed him to tune out the background noise.

‘And why is that?’ he asked.

‘I am beyond the galaxy, beyond the Mechanicus,’ said Telok, and it seemed to Roboute as though the words of the archmagos resonated from the structure of the crystal ship.

Kotov glanced up in concern at Telok’s provocative words.

‘I built everything you see here, Master Surcouf. Me, not the Mechanicus and not the Imperium. Why waste resources and time on needless ornamentations when there are none to see them and so much great work to be done? The Breath of the Gods has shown me how lost the Mechanicus have become, how little they remember of their former greatness. I will restore that to them. I will save Mars from itself!’

The room was dark, but Linya Tychon changed that with a thought. Soft illumination rose up, sourceless and without haste. The room was spartanly furnished: just a bed, a recessed rail with her robes hanging from it, a writing desk, a terminal with a moulded plastic chair in front of it and a modest ablutions cubicle.

She pulled back the bedclothes and sat up, swinging her legs out onto the floor. It was warm underfoot. Linya blinked away the remnants of a bad dream, something unpleasant, but already fading. She placed her hands on her temples, looking strangely at her fingertips as though she expected to see something.

Shaking her head, Linya poured water from a copper ewer into a plastic cup. She didn’t recall there having been water beside her bed, nor even a table and cup, but took a drink anyway.

The water was cool and pure, as if only recently collected from a mountain spring or the depths of an ancient glacier. It quenched the immediate thirst, but didn’t feel like it refreshed her.

She stood and selected a robe, pulling it over her head and wriggling into it before pulling the waist cinch tight. Pouring another cup of water, she sat on the plastic chair before the terminal and pulled up the previous cycle of the Gallery’s survey inloads. Kilometres-long detection devices encircling the Quatria Gallery stared unblinking into space, gathering vast quantities of data on far distant celestial phenomena.

But data only meant something once it had been interpreted.

Linya’s eyes scanned the scrolling columns of figures, blink-capturing interesting segments of the sky, particularly the distant star formations in the Perseus arm of the galaxy, where the first pulse-star had been discovered.

Linya let the data wash through her, noting times and distances with each swipe of a page. So far, nothing unusual. She tapped a hand on the wall beside her, and a portion of the wall faded to transparency, creating an aperture that looked out onto the void and glittering stars. Not a real window, of course, simply a pict representation of what lay beyond her insulated and armoured chamber. Having a real window was too much of a risk. Ablation cascade effects from a long-ended void-conflict had made the orbital tracks of Quatria lousy with fragments, rendering the planet below essentially unreachable.

Only an emergency boost into a graveyard orbit and rigorously maintained shield protocols had kept the Quatria Gallery intact in the aftermath of the fighting. The Mechanicus had wanted to abandon the Gallery, to scrap the machinery and repurpose it to more profitable areas of research, but Vitali Tychon had point-blank refused to mothball his beloved observatory.

Thinking of her father, Linya pulled up a three-dimensional representation of the Gallery’s internal structure – two spinning cones linked at their tips by a slender connecting passageway, and vast spans of far-reaching detection arrays radiating from their flat bases. The staff of the Quatria Gallery was minimal, just Linya, her father, six lexmechanics and a handful of servitors.

Linya frowned. Vitali’s icon was not aboard.

‘Where are you, father?’ she muttered.

Perhaps he was outside the station, repairing a misaligned mirror or shield relay, but she doubted it. That was servitor work. In any case, her father disliked venturing beyond the station’s interior if he didn’t have to. And even if he had, he would have informed her of his intention to go outside.

Linya pressed a finger to her ear and said, ‘Father? Can you hear me?’

A faint wash of static, like the caress of waves over sand, was her only answer. Linya frowned and turned to the faux window, using the haptic implants on her fingertips to sweep the exterior picters around the station. The metal skin of the Quatria Gallery was granite-coloured flexsteel, rippling with undersea reflections from the enclosing energy fields. Linya panned the view around, hunting for the crab-like vehicle they used to manoeuvre around the hull and repair anything that needed fixing.

She found it easily enough, still moored to one of the upper transit hubs. Haloed by a corona of light from the planet below.

A breath of something cold passed over Linya’s neck and she turned her chair. The door to her room was open, which was unusual. Few enough of them lived aboard the Gallery to require anything approaching privacy, but old habits died hard. Linya found it hard to imagine she’d left the door open.

‘Is there someone there?’ she asked.

No one answered, but then they wouldn’t, would they?

She rose from the chair and locked her terminal. She turned to the window, but her hand making the haptic gesture to close it froze when she saw something unusual.

Or, rather, when she didn’t see something unusual.

Quatria was a mostly inert rock, a rust-red ball of iron oxide and tholeiitic basalt. On most cycles, it was visible as though through a haze of mist, the result of the ever-growing mass in the debris cascade.

Linya now saw the planet as she had not seen it for decades, with pin-sharp clarity and clearly defined terrain features.

Breath sighed over her neck again, and she spun around. It felt like someone was standing right behind her. A half-glimpsed outline of a shape moved at the edge of her door. Too quick to be recognised.

‘Wait!’ called Linya.

She crossed the room quickly and stepped out into the corridor. Bare metal curved away in both directions, but a whisper of cloth on steel drew her gaze to the right. Another flicker of movement. Linya set off after the shape, not even sure what she was chasing or what she expected to find.

The Mechanicus weren’t given to playing jokes on one another, and it seemed wholly unlikely there was an intruder aboard. Any ship would have been detected months before it reached them. And what could an intruder hope to gain from boarding covertly?

Linya paused at a junction of passageways, seeking any sign of the figure she’d seen earlier.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is there anyone here?’

Silence answered her. Quatria was a large station, but not so large and complex in its internal arrangement that it would be easy to lose someone. Without her father’s presence she knew she should feel very alone. The servitors and lexmechanics provided no companionship, but strangely she felt anything but alone.

It felt as though there were unseen eyes upon her. As intrusive as being covertly observed ought to be, Linya felt no threat, merely a weary sadness.

‘Who are you?’ she said to the darkness. ‘And how did you get aboard Quatria?’

Maddening silence surrounded her, and Linya balled her fists.

‘What have you done with my father? Where is Vitali?’ she demanded, feeling a moment of intense sadness at the mention of her father’s name.

Linya turned as she heard soft footfalls behind her.

A magos in a black robe stood in the centre of the corridor, his hands laced before him and his head concealed beneath a hood of impenetrable shadows. Only the soft shimmer of a pair of silver eyes hinted at augmetics beneath.

The presences Linya felt observing her retreated, fearful of this individual. She didn’t know him, but was instinctively wary.

<Hello, Mistress Tychon,> said the adept, speaking an archaic form of binary, one she had last heard in the ossuary reliquaries of the Schiaparelli Sorrow.

<Who are you?> she asked, phrasing her answer in the same canted form. <And where are we?>

<Don’t you recognise this place?>

<I recognise what it’s supposed to be.>

The adept sighed. <And we were so careful to reconstruct it from your memories.>

<It’s a good likeness of Quatria,> admitted Linya, <but you forgot the orbital debris from the void-war.>

<We do not recall seeing that in your memories.>

<It’s so much a part of Quatria that I don’t even think about it now, it’s just… there.>

<Memory blindness, yes, that would explain it,> said the figure.

<Now tell me who you are.>

<Do you not yet know? And we had such high hopes for you.>

<Not yet,> said Linya, though a horrible suspicion was forming in her mind. <Tell me why I’m here, wherever here is.>

<Ah, now that we can tell you,> said the adept. <You are here because you are exceptional, Mistress Tychon. This is a place where like-minded individuals meet in a collective neuromatrix of debate and shared experience. You are not the only exceptional mind here, Mistress Tychon, there are others. We promise you will contribute greatly to our ongoing growth.>

<So this is a shared experiential consciousness?>

<Of a sort, yes.>

<Yours?>

<In a manner of speaking,> agreed the adept.

<I don’t want to be here,> said Linya. <I want you to release me and let my neural pathways realign in my body.>

<We are afraid we can’t do that, Linya,> said the adept.

<Why not?>

<There was an accident, you see,> said the adept. <Your body was gravely injured, and this was the only way to keep your exceptional mind from being lost forever.>

Linya heard falsehood in the adept’s words, but also truth. She had been hurt, hadn’t she? Badly hurt. She felt dizzy and reached out to steady herself on the wall as her legs felt suddenly powerless to support her. The wall was warm beneath her fingertips. That warmth turned to searing heat, and Linya snatched her hand back from the wall.

<I was burned,> she said, sensing a memory groping for the surface. She pushed it down, not yet ready to face such pain.

<As we said, you were gravely hurt,> said the adept. <Were we to return you to your body, you would die in agony moments later. Trust us, this way is best. Here you will live on, enhancing the whole with the sum of your learning, your experience and thirst for knowledge. Is that not better than death?>

<I want to know where I am,> said Linya. <Whose mind space is this?>

She felt the unseen eyes willing her not to continue down this road. Linya ignored them. She had never been one for shying away from hard facts or inconvenient truths.

<We can show you, but centuries of experience has taught us that it is better for a mind to come to the realisation of its new circumstances without our help. We have lost more than one mind to transition shock, and you must trust us when we say that is a most painful way to cease existing.>

<Show me, damn you.>

<Very well,> he said. <We will alter the perceptual centres of your brain to receive inputs and discern our immediate surroundings. Your memories will be unlocked as well, though we must warn you, you will very much dislike what you learn.>

<Stop stalling and show me.>

The adept nodded and stepped towards the wall.

With hands that looked as though they were made of dozens of scalpel blades bound together with copper wire, the adept drew the outline of a window in the wall. Antiseptic light shone through, stark and unforgiving.

Linya edged towards the light, feeling the drag of the unseen observers as they wordlessly screamed at her to retreat. Every step felt like she was walking towards an executioner’s block, but she had willed this resolution. She couldn’t back down now.

She edged closer to the light, and looked out through the window. What she was seeing made no sense without memory to frame it and give it context.

As easily as a key turns in a lock, those memories returned in an instant as the gates of her hippocampus were stormed by synaptic flares exploding in her cerebral cortex.

Linya saw a body lying on bloodstained sheets, a body with her face. A body with the skull pared open and the cranial vault excised of brain matter.

In a singular moment of horror, Linya remembered exactly where she was and what Galatea had done to her.

The corridor was ten metres wide, ribbed with pilasters of latticed green steelwork. A vault of leering gargoyles arched overhead, water droplets falling from rusted rivets and the lips of half-hidden statues in secluded alcoves. The company of Cadians jogged beneath them at battle pace, keeping their attention firmly fixed on the route ahead.

Captain Blayne Hawkins ran at the head of the column, arms pumping with a metronomic precision to match the piston heads in the chamber they had just left. Despite the chill, he was sweating hard, his uniform jacket plastered to his skin. His breath punched from his lungs with every thudding footfall.

On Cadia he could run like this for hours.

But this wasn’t Cadia.

The ninety-three men behind him were tired, but weren’t showing it. He reckoned they’d run around fifteen kilometres in full battle-gear through the twisting guts of the Speranza, though it was hard to be certain exactly how far they’d come. The Ark Mechanicus was a nightmare to navigate or maintain any sense of distance from.

It made formulating a workable defence of the ship difficult, but difficult was meat and gravy to Cadians. Ahead, the corridor branched left and right, with the towering statue of a hooded magos dividing it into a V-shaped junction.

‘Hostile corners, secure flanks for advance!’ called Hawkins.

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the company split into two. Evens went left, odds right. The first squads moved close to the metalled walls of the corridor, but not along them. A ricocheting solid round might ride a wall for a hundred metres or more. The evens aimed their lasrifles along the rightmost passage, the odds the left. Hawkins took position with the evens, the stock of his rifle hard against his cheek.

The squads at the rear of the company adopted a near identical formation, their guns covering behind.

‘Clear!’

‘Clear!’

‘Hindmost squads, take point!’ shouted Hawkins.

The squads covering the rear now moved up, smooth as a training drill, to take the lead. Hawkins went with them as they passed, covered by the guns of the men in front. The overwatching squads took position at the rear as Hawkins moved to the front of the jogging column.

This was the tenth battle drill they’d practised en route to the training deck. They’d practised corridor assault drills, room clearances in empty forge-temples and even run reconnaissance in force of a vast hangar filled with smashed lifter-rigs.

A starship was one of the worst environments in which to fight. The vessels were dark, unfamiliar, cramped and were often being violently breached by broadsides and boarders from the void. Unforgiving battlefields, they made for intense training grounds, and Hawkins wasn’t about to waste this extended period of time aboard ship without making the most of their surroundings.

The company moved down the gloomy corridor, splashing through pools of water collected on the bowed deck plates. They passed beneath the gaze of mechanical cherubs and floating skulls that zipped overhead on mysterious errands for their Martian masters.

Hawkins ran another two drills – crossing an intersection, and sweeping a gridded chamber of hung chains. Its ceiling was obscured by clouds of hot steam and its walls rippled with lightning encased in thick glass cylinders.

Eventually, Hawkins and his men reached the end of the run. Their battle pace hadn’t slackened once, but it was a relief to finally reach their destination.

Hawkins led his men onto a wide esplanade platform overlooking Magos Dahan’s fiefdom, the training deck. This enormous space sat at the heart of the Speranza, a vast, constantly changing arena where the armed forces of the Ark Mechanicus could train in a multitude of varied battle simulations.

Dahan had put the Cadians through some hard engagements here.

Nothing they hadn’t been able to handle, but testing nonetheless. Despite his assurances to the contrary, Hawkins knew Dahan didn’t really understand Cadians at all.

Few did.

After all, what other world of the Imperium basked in the baleful glow of the Eye of Terror? What soldiers learned to hold a lasgun before they could walk? What regiments earned scars other regiments could only dream of before they’d even left their birthrock?

Irritatingly, Rae’s company were already here. His senior sergeant’s men sat on the edge of the platform, watching the skitarii below fighting through a mocked-up ork encampment that filled the nearest quadrant of the training deck.

In the far distance, nearly a kilometre away, the Titans of Legio Sirius moved with predatory grace through towers of prefabricated steel. The vibrations of their enormous footfalls could be felt as bass tremors in the floor. Hawkins made a quick aquila over his chest, remembering the destruction unleashed the last time the god-machines had walked the training deck.

Thankfully, it looked like the Legio were simply engaged in manoeuvre drills.

‘Company, halt,’ said Hawkins. ‘Rest easy. Five minutes.’

The company broke up into squads, the men taking the opportunity to stretch their aching muscles and slake their thirst from canvas-wrapped canteens.

Sergeant Rae approached, his ruddy complexion telling Hawkins he’d pushed his men hard, like any good sergeant should.

‘Nice of you to finally join us, sir,’ said Rae, offering him a drink from his own canteen. Hawkins took it and drank down a few mouthfuls. Taking too much water too quickly was a sure-fire way to get a bad case of stomach cramps.

‘How long have you been here?’ asked Hawkins.

‘About ten minutes,’ said Rae, not even having the decency to look a little humble at how much quicker he’d managed the run than his commanding officer.

‘It’s this bloody ship,’ said Hawkins. ‘The gravity’s not the same. Not like running where there’s good Cadian rock underfoot.’

‘Adept Dahan says the gravity’s Terran-standard.’

‘Damn Dahan, and damn his gravity,’ snapped Hawkins, though the cooling effects of the water and the chance to rest his limbs were already easing his irritation. ‘All right, then the ship gave you a short cut.’

‘The ship?’ said Rae with a raised eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘You know as well as I do that this ship’s got a mind of its own when it comes to its internal structure,’ said Hawkins, taking another drink.

‘We ran into a few unexpected twists and turns along the way, it’s true,’ agreed Rae.

‘A few unexpected twists and turns?’ said Hawkins. ‘That’s putting it mildly. No matter how many hours I pore over data-slate schematics or the shipwright’s wax-paper blueprints, the Speranza’s always got a surprise in store. A turn that isn’t where it’s supposed to be, a branching route that doesn’t appear on any of the plans.’

‘It’s a queer old ship, I’ll give you that,’ said Rae, making a clumsy attempt at the Cog Mechanicus to take any sting out of his words.

Hawkins handed back Rae’s canteen, leaning on the railing looking out over the training deck. ‘Glad to see we’re on the same page, sergeant.’

Rae took a drink and slipped the canteen into his battle-gear.

‘Any word from the colonel?’ he asked.

Hawkins shook his head. ‘Nothing yet, but Azuramagelli tells me there’s no vox-traffic coming from the surface at all.’

‘Should we be concerned about that?’

‘Yes, I think we should,’ said Hawkins, now seeing a tall man with close-cropped silver hair farther along the esplanade platform. He’d mistaken him for one of Rae’s men, but now saw he was wearing simple coveralls with a nondescript padded trench coat emblazoned with a stylised canidae. Cadians typically had pinched, hollow features, but this man had the well-fed, scarred cheekbones of a feral noble or warlike hive-lord. Icy eyes darted back and forth, watching the skitarii training under Dahan’s booming instructions.

No, that wasn’t right.

The man had no interest in the skitarii. He was watching the Titans.

‘Who’s he?’ asked Hawkins, jutting his chin out at the man.

‘Not sure,’ answered Rae. ‘He’s got his collar up, but I saw a socket in the back of his neck and his fingers have got metal tips. That and the canidae crest make me think Titan crew.’

‘So why’s he not out there?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Rae.

Hawkins dismissed the man from his thoughts. What did it matter who he was? There were tens of thousands of people aboard the Speranza he didn’t know. What difference did one more make?

‘Right,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Let’s get to it.’

Rae nodded and turned to the two companies that were already standing and settling their battle-gear back onto their shoulders and hips.

‘Companies!’ bellowed Rae in a voice known to sergeants all across the Imperium. ‘Magos Dahan has put together a couple of arenas he thinks will test us. Shall we show him how wrong he is?’

The men grinned and quickly formed up into their companies. It had become a point of pride that they could meet any challenge Dahan’s arenas might throw at them.

Hawkins led the way down the iron stairs to the training deck.

He glanced up at the man with silver hair and scarred cheeks. Sensing Hawkins’s gaze, he waved and shouted down to the Cadians.

‘You’re fighting a simulation?’ he asked. ‘Now?’

Hawkins shouted back. ‘It’s rare you get to fight when you’re rested, so why train that way?’

‘You’re mad!’

‘We’re Cadian,’ returned Hawkins. ‘It’s sort of the same thing.’

Exnihlio was everything Archmagos Kotov had hoped for, a wonderland of technological marvels, incredible industry and lost science. From the moment he’d extended the hand of friendship to his fellow archmagos, he knew he was vindicated in his decision to take the Speranza beyond the galactic rim.

All the doubters who had mocked his decision to embark on this daring mission would be silenced now. With Telok at his side, Archmagos Kotov would return to Mars in triumph. The holdings he had lost to catastrophe, xenos invasion and treachery would be insignificant next to what he would gain.

The wealth and knowledge of Mars laid at his feet.

Title, position and domains.

Who knew to what dizzying heights he might ascend?

Master of his own quadrangle, perhaps even Fabricator General one day. With the discovery of the Breath of the Gods to his name, it would be simplicity itself to quietly ease the incumbent Fabricator into a life of solitary research.

Fabricator General Kotov.

Yes, it had a solemnity and gravitas befitting so vital a role.

So now that he had reached his destination and found the Lost Magos, why did his grandiose dreams feel even further away?

Archmagos Telok was both more and less than what he had hoped. Bizarre in form, yes, but no more so than many of the more zealous adherents of the Ferran Mortification Creed. He was still undeniably human, but the crystalline growths encrusting his body had all the hallmarks of something parasitic, not augmentative.

Telok’s declaration of saving Mars from itself had horrified him, and his initial response had been a frantic series of cease-and-desist blurts of command binary. All of which had failed utterly to have any effect on Telok, whose archaic cognitive architecture was incapable of processing such inputs.

<I take it you disagree with what I said to Surcouf?> asked Telok, with the brutal syntax of pre-hexamathic cant. <I can’t imagine why.>

Kotov paused before answering, switching back to the older form of binary. With as many diplomatic overtones as could be applied to such a basic cant-form, Kotov said, <There are those among the Adeptus Mechanicus who would consider such words treasonous.>

<Then they are fools, Kotov,> said Telok. <You and I, we know better. We are explorators, men of vision and foresight. What do the hooded men of Mars know of realms beyond the galaxy? With laboratories hidden beneath the red sands and heads stuck just as deeply in the past, what do such timid souls know of real exploration? The Adeptus Mechanicus is a corpse rotting from the inside out, Kotov. I knew it back when I set out for the Halo Scar, and I see you know it too. Tell me I’m wrong.>

Kotov struggled to find an answer. To hear a priest of Mars say such things beggared belief. At best, such an outburst would see an adept denied advancement through the Cult Mechanicus. At worst it would see him branded excommunicatus-technicus, stripped of his every augmentation or transformed into a servitor.

Even an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a servant of the Machine-God who would normally be granted a degree of latitude in such matters, could not voice such things openly.

<You have been away from the Imperium for some time,> replied Kotov. <And while there is much within the Mechanicus I believe could work better, you cannot seriously entertain such thoughts?>

Telok laughed. <Ah, Kotov, dear fellow, you must forgive me. It’s been too long since I had anything but crystaliths and servitors to talk to. The conversational deficit has made me forget myself.>

<Then I will overlook your hasty words, archmagos.>

<Of course you will,> said Telok, and the growths jutting from his metal hide like armoured horns flared in response. <You and I? We are gods to these men, and it does not behove gods to squabble before lesser beings. You agree, of course?>

<I agree that it is never good for superiors to argue before those who must serve them,> said Kotov.

<Quite,> said Telok, and the Lost Magos returned to steering the crystal ship through the megalithic structures, vast generator plants for the most part, though there were some buildings whose purpose even Kotov could not identify.

<That one man could build this from nothing, without a geoformer fleet, is nothing short of miraculous,> said Kotov. <How did you do it? I must know.>

<All in good time, archmagos.>

<I have so many questions,> continued Kotov, trying not to let his growing unease with Telok outweigh his admiration for what the Lost Magos had achieved. <Where is the rest of your fleet? The crew of the Tomioka? Are they here too?>

<I promised to answer your questions in good time, archmagos,> said Telok, his crystals pulsing with jagged spikes of illumination. <And I will. Trust me, all will become clear when I show you the Breath of the Gods.>

<And will that be soon?>

Telok did not answer, guiding their course from between the looming structures enclosing them. The crystal ship skimmed into an enormous metalled plaza, not unlike the one upon which the Thunderhawk of the Black Templars had landed.

At the centre of the plaza sat a colossal silver-skinned dome, at least four kilometres in diameter and a quarter that in height. Could the scale of what lay beneath be extrapolated from its incredible dimensions?

The vastness of the dome was breathtaking, and as the crystal ship slipped effortlessly through the air towards it, Kotov saw the faintest outline of rippling energy fields.

More than one, in fact. Banks of shields layered the dome, more than even shrouded the sacred slopes of Olympus Mons. Whatever lay within was clearly of immense value.

<Is the Breath of the Gods within?> asked Kotov.

<It is,> grinned Telok, showing blunted, porcelain-looking teeth. <Would you like to see it?>

<More than you can imagine.>

Telok moved his gnarled fingers across the lectern in a precise geomantic pattern. Twin arcs of glossy metal unfolded from the plaza, self-assembling and curving over organically to form an arch some fifty metres before the dome. Where its outer edges contacted the dome’s energy fields, disruptive arcs of lightning exploded in a nova-like corona.

A curtain of sparking, crackling energy filled the space within the arc, and Kotov shifted warily on the bench as he saw Telok meant to steer them through it.

The emptiness of the plaza made it difficult to accurately gauge the size of the arch until they were almost upon it. Kotov’s internal calibrators measured it as two hundred metres wide and ninety high.

And then they passed beneath it, and the silver skin of the dome, which Kotov now saw was formed from overlapping scales like reptile skin, rippled as it reshaped to form an opening. Light like a blood-red sunrise breaking over the Tharsis Montes shone from within, carrying with it the promise of the future. Kotov felt his floodstream surge in response.

‘The Breath of the Gods awaits!’ said Telok as the crystal ship passed into the dome.

The beating Renard had taken in her forced landing on the Speranza was still very much in evidence, but all things considered, it could have been a lot worse. Emil Nader walked down the starship’s port-side flank with a pair of servitors at his heels. Both were equipped with vox-recorders, faithfully listening to his critical appraisal of the work the Mechanicus had undertaken on his vessel.

It was stream of consciousness stuff, but with the in perpetuitus refit contract Roboute had negotiated with the Mechanicus, now was the time to get as much done as humanly possible.

Scaffolding rigs surrounded the prow, which hung suspended over a graving dock in which the boxy form of Adept Kryptaestrex supervised the work of nearly two hundred servitors and bondsmen as they laboured to repair Renard’s prow. The prow and ventral sections of the ship had taken the worst of the damage. Like any pilot, Emil never quite trusted those who didn’t fly to know exactly what they were doing, so was keeping a close eye on the servitors. So far, he grudgingly, and it was very grudgingly, had to admit the Mechanicus were doing a decent job.

Emil paused beside a newly fabricated panel installed in an airlock hatch that had once been stamped with an Espandorian artificer’s mark.

‘You have got to be kidding me,’ he said, following up with an Iaxian oath best not repeated in earshot of a lady. ‘The nerve of these sons of bitches.’

‘Transcription alert,’ said the two servitors, one after the other. ‘Implanted lexicon conflict. Do you wish a phonetic transcription?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Emil, before remembering he was talking to a servitor. ‘No. I don’t want that recorded.’

He jabbed a finger at the nearest servitor then pointed to a wheeled rack of parts and forge-gear sitting at the base of a scaffold-rig. ‘You, go get a pneuma-hammer.’

The servitor retrieved the requested tool before returning to its station, exactly one metre behind Emil.

‘Now get that off my ship,’ he said, pointing to the gleaming Icon Mechanicus on the hatch. The cog-toothed skull had been set in the centre of the hatch, completely obscuring the artificer’s mark.

‘Clarification required,’ said the servitor. ‘What is it you wish removed?’

‘The Icon Mechanicus,’ said Emil. ‘Get it off.’

‘Unable to comply,’ said the servitor. ‘Express permission from a tech-priest, rank Lambda-Tertius or higher, is required before this servile may deface/remove an Icon Mechanicus.’

‘Throne, don’t you bloody Mechanicus know anything about why starships stay aloft?’ he snapped. ‘Here, hand me that pneuma-hammer.’

The servitor held the device out and Emil snatched it from its unresisting grip. He bent to the airlock hatch and with three swift blows from the pneuma-hammer battered the silver-steel icon to the deck.

‘Good as new,’ he said, holding the pneuma-hammer out behind him and brushing flecks of metal shavings away with his free hand. The hammer was plucked from his grasp and a gruff voice came from behind him.

‘And this is why you leave engineering to folk who know what they’re doing.’

‘It’s bad luck to cover up the original maker’s marks,’ said Emil, standing upright.

Kayrn Sylkwood, Renard’s enginseer, saw the emblem he’d knocked off the ship and nodded in agreement. She ran a hand over the dented metalwork Emil had just beaten free of the Icon Mechanicus.

‘Nice work,’ she said. ‘Subtle.’

‘You’re an enginseer, what do you know about subtle?’

‘More than you, by the looks of it,’ said Sylkwood. The rivalry between a pilot and a ship’s master of engines was long-established. One trying to squeeze the most out of a ship’s reactors, one trying to keep the other from blowing them up.

Clad in a tight-fitting vest and combat jacket, Kayrn Sylkwood was a born and bred enginseer. Knotted communion implants lined her shaven skull in metallic cornrows, and her tanned features had a laconic superiority to them. Baggy fatigues that might once have been tan-coloured, but which were now an oil-sodden slate, were tucked into military boots, laced in the Cadian cross-hatch style.

‘How’s it looking out here?’ she asked.

‘Despite the odd bit of complete idiocy, not as bad as I expected,’ said Emil, moving down the hull towards the sunken space below the prow, where sparks from arc-welders and lascutters fell like neon-blue rain. Sylkwood fell in alongside him, unconsciously matching his step. The two servitors resumed their obedient following.

‘Speranza’s priests actually seem like they know what they’re doing,’ said Emil, running his hands along the warm metal of the Renard’s fuselage. ‘The damaged hull plates have been repaired in Turentek’s prow-forges, the forward auspex arrays have been stripped out and replaced, and I see the transverse inertial arrays being reinforced. There’s been some unasked-for upgrades by the look of it, but I’ll only find out exactly what when I take her out again.’

‘Not bad,’ said Sylkwood. ‘Not bad at all.’

‘They all done in the engine spaces?’

Kayrn nodded. ‘Yeah, there wasn’t much to do, and Ilanna had left pretty specific instructions. But I didn’t let them do anything without me right there with them. If we had a halfway decent pilot at the helm, I’d guess we’d probably see a ten per cent boost to Renard’s top speed and reactor efficiency.’

‘Then I’ll get fifteen.’

‘You think?’

‘Bet you a shift on the loaders.’

They spat on their palms and slapped hands.

‘You watch, I’ll get my ship doing things her builders never even dreamed of,’ said Emil.

‘Your ship?’ said Kayrn with a grin. ‘I reckon the captain might have something to say about that word choice.’

Emil returned her grin. ‘Roboute isn’t here. And he doesn’t fly the ship, I do. In my books that makes the Renard mine.’

Kayrn looked set to challenge that assertion, but before she could do more than cock an eyebrow, they heard a horrified wail from the entrance to the graving dock.

‘What the hell?’ said Kayrn, her hand falling to the butt of her holstered laspistol. ‘Is that Vitali Tychon?’

‘Looks like,’ said Emil, lifting his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the deck’s harsh lighting. ‘I think he’s been hurt.’

Vitali staggered towards the Renard. His robes were drenched in blood from the chest down. Did Mechanicus priests have that much blood in them?

‘It’s not his blood,’ said Kayrn as Vitali half ran, half staggered towards them. He was shouting something, but his words were too grief-stricken and anguished to make out.

‘Then whose blood is it?’ said Emil.

Forge Elektrus was not what Abrehem had imagined when Totha Mu-32 had said he was to be apprenticed to a magos of the Cult Mechanicus. He had pictured towering engines and the thunderous, unceasing labours of powerful machinery.

A place where things were made, technology unbound.

Not this place of antiquity, an echoing machine-temple where dust lay thick on the titanic engines that stood cold and dead to either side of a mosaic-covered nave. The only machines at work here were the lumen staves carried by the two forge overseers and the crackling inload trunking that allowed the thirty shaven-headed tech-priests to link their cognitive capacity.

Arranged in five rows of six, they sat on hard wooden benches before a rusted throne worked into a representation of the Icon Mechanicus. Chained together like galley slaves by ribbed copper cabling plugged into data-sockets in the backs of their skulls, their heads bobbed rhythmically to a hypnotic binary beat only they could hear.

Abrehem had seen that every one was the lowest rank it was possible to be and still be counted as one of the Martian priesthood. Many bore terrible injuries suffered in service to the Machine-God: missing limbs, burned skin and cratered skulls. Just as many bore marks of censure in their noospheric auras. Others had been implanted with augments that had obviously been damaged or been cycled through so many adepts over the centuries that it was a miracle they functioned at all.

Truly this was a forge of the damned, where the lowliest, most pitiable adepts imaginable toiled. So why had Totha Mu-32 sent him here? What could he possibly learn in a place populated by the mad, the infirm and the punished?

How was this any better than where he had come from?

No answer was obvious, and Chiron Manubia had thus far been less than forthcoming. Without the necessary inload sockets, Abrehem couldn’t take his place with the linked adepts in their fugue state, and for that he was profoundly grateful.

Instead, he sat on the pew of a wide timber lectern, such as he might expect to find in a mass scriptorium of the Administratum. A book of quantum runes lay open before him, each holy circuit etched into the electro-conductive pages with copper wiring.

The book was ancient and marked by thousands of blurred fingerprints. Perhaps it had belonged to the first builders of this temple.

He’d been studying it for what seemed like weeks, tracing metalled fingers across its dogmatic forms and endless repetition. Its needless complexity was straining his powers of concentration and testing the limits of his boredom. Almost every litany was monstrously overwrought and only achieved what he could do with a thought. To work to such prescribed methods was ridiculous and he sat back from the book with a weary sigh of resignation.

‘You think you’re too good for Forge Elektrus, don’t you?’ said his new tutor, startling Abrehem from his gloomy contemplation of a needlessly complex runic form of the Ohmic Evocation.

Abrehem looked up into the almond-shaped face of Chiron Manubia.

He still didn’t know what shared history lay between her and Totha Mu-32, but every time he looked at Manubia’s face, he felt sure it had involved something unpleasantly biological.

‘No, that’s not it at all,’ said Abrehem.

‘You’re a terrible liar,’ said Manubia, sitting next to him on the lectern’s pew.

‘Sorry, I just thought your forge would be… different.’

Manubia cocked an eyebrow.

‘Different,’ she said, echoing the wariness he’d put into each syllable. ‘You thought it would be a forge where the wonders of technology were handed down straight from the golden hands of the Omnissiah?’

Abrehem kept his mouth shut in case he said something truly stupid. He tapped the iron fingers of his augmetic arm against the edge of the lectern.

Manubia smiled. ‘I thought so. Forge Elektrus isn’t quite like the forges depicted in the devotional frescoes, is it?’

Since lying to Manubia clearly wasn’t an option, Abrehem opted for honesty. ‘No, it hardly looks like a forge at all.’

‘What did you think? That someone who almost got the Speranza destroyed was going to just walk into the most prestigious forge on the ship and begin his rise through the Cult Mechanicus?’

‘No, of course not, but…’

‘But you thought you’d be learning all our secrets from the minute you walked in,’ said Manubia. ‘Well, I’m afraid you have to earn that right, Abrehem Locke. Because, right now, you are the lowest of the low. You are the scrapings of millennial rust from a broken gear, the contaminated oil that’s on the verge of being too polluted to use on even the most mangled waste recycler. And the only reason I didn’t slam the door in Totha Mu-32’s face is that, Omnissiah preserve me, I think he might be right about you.’

‘That I’m Machine-touched?’

‘No, that you’re dangerous,’ said Manubia.

‘Dangerous?’

‘You think you know machines, that you can talk to them and that it’s a simple matter to coax them into doing what you want, but you’re like a child with the key to an armoury of loaded weapons,’ said Manubia, jabbing a finger at the book of quantum runes. ‘You have power, a power I don’t understand yet, but you don’t know how to use it safely. That’s why you’re here – not to become the saviour of the Adeptus Mechanicus, but to be controlled, to have whatever power you have made safe. That’s what I do, Abrehem Locke.’

‘What you do?’ said Abrehem, angry at being so casually dismissed. ‘It doesn’t look like you do anything here.’

Manubia turned and gestured to the cog-toothed entrance to her forge.

‘Then feel free to leave, but know that no priest of the Cult Mechanicus will ever let you inside their temple again.’

Abrehem slammed the open palm of his artificial arm on the book of quantum runes.

‘Then tell me, Adept Manubia,’ he said. ‘What do you do? What vital role in the operations of the Speranza are these poor wretches involved in?’

‘Nothing,’ said Manubia. ‘They’re too broken to be of any use.’

Abrehem shook his head. ‘Then I don’t see any point in me being here.’

‘You didn’t let me finish,’ said Manubia. ‘They’re here because they’re broken. But by the time they leave, they won’t be. I gather up the waifs and strays of the Cult Mechanicus – the damaged, the broken, the data-blind, the augment-crippled – and I give them purpose again. I rebuild and remake what’s broken inside them and I make them useful again. I give them purpose. And that’s what I can do for you, if you’ll let me.’

‘I’m not broken,’ said Abrehem.

‘Aren’t you?’ said Manubia, her face lit from below by a swiftly glowing illumination.

Abrehem looked down, his eyes widening as he saw the etched copper diagram of the Ohmic Evocation fill with liquid light that flowed from his iron fingers. The metalled surface of the book felt hot to the touch, the light penetrating deeper into its pages with each passing second.

‘Whatever you’re doing, stop it now,’ demanded Manubia. ‘Lift your augmetic from the book.’

Abrehem shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

Golden light poured from the book, following the corded cables plugged into the base of the lectern. It lit the forge in a radiance it had not known since its earliest days, passing through the archaic trunking system and into the crippled tech-priests.

They stiffened as the light flowed into them and through them, seeking new pathways to illuminate, new circuits to restore. Thousands of snaking threads of golden light moved through the machine-temple, racing along frayed and forgotten wires. The Icon Mechanicus shimmered with reflected radiance as ancient wiring within the throne that had not known the touch of electro-motive power in millennia pulsed with life.

‘How are you doing this?’ gasped Manubia. ‘What are you doing?’

Abrehem had no answer for her, watching as first one, then another of the dormant machines around the perimeter of Chiron Manubia’s forge flickered with its own internal light.

Ancient cogs turned with grating squeals, rusted gears cranked into painful motion and long-stilled machine hearts began beating once more.

One by one, the titanic engines returned to life.

The approach to the bridge of the Speranza was a towering processional vault known as the Path to Wisdom, precisely one thousand metres long, with sixty equidistant archways to either side. Threaded columns wound with variant binary forms supported the latticework tangle of green iron girders and a cloud layer of lubricant incense clung to the corbels, where squatted fat mechanical cherubs. Long strips of votive binary chattered from their mouths, random praise to the Omnissiah that teams of tech-priests and lexmechanics studied intently for any divine messages.

Sheet metal banners hung within the arches, each venerating a different branch of Mechanicus theology, from shield technology to teleportation, from weapon design to engine maintenance. A great Icon Mechanicus stared down in judgement at those who approached.

None of the tech-priests surrounded by strips of ticker-tape around the base of each column paid any attention to the small, determined group making its way to the monolithic adamantium gates of the bridge.

Vitali Tychon led the way, with Kayrn Sylkwood, Emil Nader and Adara Siavash struggling to keep up with the venerable adept. The crew of the Renard were armed, which Emil wasn’t so sure was a good idea. But as soon as Vitali had managed to explain why he was covered in blood, Emil knew a confrontation was inevitable.

And if life on Ultramar had taught Emil anything, it was that it was always a good idea to be prepared for the worst.

The vast door to the bridge was protected by a demi-cohort of praetorians, clanking mechanised killers on tracks, articulated stalk legs or heavy Dreadnought chassis. Their armaments were a lethal array of plasma weaponry, rotor carbines and linked lascannons. Smaller than the praetorians were the weaponised servitors, grotesquely augmented humans with steroidal musculatures, sub-dermal armour plating and vicious arrays of implanted blades, drills and power fists.

Emil shared a glance with Kayrn Sylkwood. Neither was a stranger to mass warfare, but these cyborgs were something else entirely – metal-masked and dispassionate.

Their approach had been noted, and every one of the Mechanicus battle-servitors turned its targeting auspex upon them. Emil had never felt quite so vulnerable.

‘No sudden movements,’ said Vitali, his voice cold, where normally it was infectiously vibrant. ‘Let me take care of this.’

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said Emil, keeping his hands well away from his hand cannon. The weapon had been his father’s, presented to him upon earning his captaincy in the Espandor Defence Auxilia. Emil had inherited it upon his father’s death a month later. Talassarian mother-of-pearl was embedded in the walnut grip in the shape of an ultima.

‘Do you actually know how to use that thing?’ asked Sylkwood.

He nodded. ‘I know every inch of this gun,’ said Emil. He’d maintained it with all the due diligence drummed into him since childhood. ‘It’s in as perfect working order as it was the day it left the craftsman’s workbench.’

‘You ever fired it?’

‘No, not once.’

‘Good to know,’ said Sylkwood.

‘Look, it’s not me you need to worry about,’ said Emil, nodding towards Adara Siavash. The youthfully handsome gunman had come aboard the Renard a number of years ago as a passenger, but after proving he had what it took to use his pistols and ubiquitous butterfly blade, Roboute had decided to keep him on as a member of the crew. For a man so intimate with ways of ending life, he wore his heart on his sleeve, and had been endearingly sweet in his hopeless infatuation with Mistress Linya.

Emil had seen Adara fight and kill, but until now, he’d never seen him angry. The cold, unflinching, razor-fine hostility he saw in the youth’s eyes was not something he’d ever expected to see.

‘Listening, Adara?’ said Sylkwood. ‘Let Vitali take the lead.’

The young gunman nodded, but didn’t reply.

Sylkwood shrugged with an I tried expression.

Vitali didn’t slow his pace as he approached the praetorians and weaponised servitors. Auspexes clicked and whirred as lenses extended, gathering information from Vitali’s noospheric aura. Satisfied it was addressing a being that didn’t qualify for immediate destruction, a towering praetorian armed with twin power fists extended a vox-unit from its throat.

‘Magos Vitali Tychon, stellar cartographer, AM4543/1001011.’

‘Stand down,’ said Vitali.

An internal cogitator whirred within its cranium and a chattering stream of tape emerged from the back of its skull.

‘Your presence has not been requested.’

‘I’m aware of that, but I’m going onto the bridge and you are not going to stop me.’

‘Without current authorised access privileges, entry to the bridge is impossible,’ said the praetorian.

‘I am a high magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ snapped Vitali. ‘Are you going to stop me?’

‘Updated bridge security protocols authorise the use of force up to and including, but not limited to, lethal levels.’

Emil felt a layer of sweat form all over his body. The cyborg was talking about killing them with as much thought as he might give to stepping on a ship louse.

He leaned over to whisper to Kayrn. ‘If I’m going to die here, I’d rather it was at the hands of something that gave a damn about killing me.’

‘Yeah, because that makes dying so much better,’ she said.

‘Are you denying me access to the bridge?’ said Vitali.

‘Affirmative, Magos Tychon,’ confirmed the praetorian. ‘Do you wish me to submit a priority access request to Magos Blaylock?’

‘No, I want you to open the damn door.’

‘Your request cannot be completed at this time.’

Vitali turned to Emil and the others.

‘Master Nader, Master Siavash, I’d cover my ears if I were you. And, Mistress Sylkwood, please mute any noospheric-capable communion receptors if you please. I apologise in advance for what will, I’m sure, be most unpleasant.’

Emil knew better than to ask why and pressed his hands hard over his ears as Vitali turned back to the intransigent praetorian. Adara followed his example as Kayrn thumped the heel of one palm to the side of her head.

Vitali squared his shoulders and addressed the praetorian again. ‘I didn’t want to have to do this, but you’ve left me no choice.’

Before the servitor could answer, Vitali unleashed a shriek of violent binary from his chest augmitters. Even with his hands clamped over his ears, Emil felt it like someone had just detonated a bomb in the centre of his skull. Sylkwood dropped to one knee, her face twisted in pain.

As painful as Vitali’s binaric shriek was for them, the effect on the praetorians and weaponised servitors was far more spectacular. Relays within iron skulls exploded and implanted doctrina wafers melted upon receipt of self-immolation protocols. Every synaptic connection within the servitors’ heads blew instantaneously. Orange flames licked from their eye sockets and fatty smoke curled from those whose mouths were not already sealed shut. The stalk-limbed praetorian crashed to the ground, its weapon arms falling limply to its sides. Bipedal combat servitors fell where they stood, like remotely piloted automatons whose operators had been abruptly yanked from their immersion rigs.

The grating, screeching wail rose and fell, like a novice vox-operator trying to find an active channel. Blood dripped from Sylkwood’s nose, and veins like power couplings stood out on the side of her neck.

Then, mercifully, it ended.

‘What did you do?’ asked Emil, gingerly taking his hands from the side of his head.

‘To many aboard the Speranza, I may be the eccentric stellar cartographer Archmagos Kotov dragged from obscurity,’ said Vitali, ‘but I am also a high magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus. There isn’t a cyborg aboard this ship I don’t know how to destroy.’

Vitali stepped over the smouldering corpses of the combat cyborgs. Their limbs twitched with rogue impulses as the molten remnants of their brains disintegrated in the wake of Vitali’s binaric holocaust.

The towering bridge doors began to open.

‘And now I’m going to kill the abomination that murdered my daughter,’ said Vitali.

Click here to buy Gods of Mars

To Gemma Noon, for all her hard work and reminding me how important the
First Reader truly is. This book was improved orders of magnitude
by her telling me to be better.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This edition published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak.

© Games Workshop Limited 2014. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy logo, The Horus Heresy eye device, Space Marine Battles, the Space Marine Battles logo, Warhammer 40,000, the Warhammer 40,000 logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated brands, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer 40,000 universe are either ®, ™ and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2014, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world.
All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78251-663-7

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at

blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at

games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.