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Lords of Mars - Extract

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001

Knowledge is power. They call that the first credo, but they are wrong. Knowledge is just the beginning. It is in the application of knowledge that power resides. After all, what is the value of discovery if we do not put what we learn into effect?

Millennia have come and gone since I became Mechanicus, but even as a novitiate caster of quantum runes, I was aware I had blindly accepted many principles unverified by my own experience as being true. Consequently, the conclusions I later based upon such principles were highly doubtful. From that moment of realisation I was convinced of the necessity of ridding myself of all the principles I had unquestioningly adopted.

I would build knowledge from my own self-discovered truths.

010

An ancient Terran order of techno-theologians once boasted heraldic devices emblazoned with the words Nullius in Verba, which even a basic proto-Gothic lexical servitor can tell you means Nothing upon Another’s Word. It is a credo I have lived by and by which I will die. The Venusian epistolarian who first scratched those words into cured animal hide was wise indeed, and the inheritors of the Red Planet would do well to recall his wisdom.

But the priests of Mars have lost sight of what it means to be Mechanicus.

The magi rejoice at scraps swept from the tables of gods and think themselves blessed. They bear such relics aloft like the greatest prizes, little realising that such intellectual flotsam and jetsam is worthless in the grand scheme of galactic endeavour.

They are idiot children stumbling around the workshop of a genius. The tools and knowledge they require to rebuild the glory of Mankind’s past is at their fingertips, yet they see it not. They wield lethally unpredictable technologies like playthings, heedless of the damage they wreak and ignorant that they are losing as much as they gain with every fumbling step.

So much that was lost has been rediscovered, they cry, but like a million scattered fragments of a puzzle, they are useless unless combined. With all that has been hidden beneath the sands of the Red Planet, we could rebuild the Imperium as it was in the halcyon days of the first great diaspora. We could achieve the dream upon which the Emperor was embarked in the fleeting moments of peace following the Pax Olympus.

Ah, how I wish I could have been there. To see the Omnissiah when He walked in the guise of flesh. To bathe in His light and feel the serenity of perfect code flowing through my body. One as mechanistically-evolved as I is not supposed to miss the soft, ever-degenerating meat-body I left behind in my ascension through the ranks of the Priesthood, but I would accept its infinite limitations just to have beheld that moment with organic eyes.

011

Now I see the world through organic silica membranes and glassine-meshed diamond. A thousand microscopic machines infiltrate the fluids that circulate within my new body of crystal and light. My limbs are powerful beyond even the strength of the Adeptus Astartes, my mind capable of ultra-fast calculations that allow cognition speeds far in advance of even the Fabricator General.

But nothing of such worth is ever achieved without sacrifice, and nothing is so fatal to the progress of Mankind as to suppose our grasp of technology is complete. To believe that there are no more mysteries in nature or that our triumphs are all won and there are no new worlds to conquer is to invite stagnation.

And stagnation is death.

I have travelled the void like few others before me.

I have crossed the barriers of time and space and seen further than any other. The elemental forces of the universe are mine to command. Time, space, gravity and light bend to my will.

Like the great celestial engineers of a far distant epoch, I carve the flesh of the galaxy to suit my desires. And where ancient war and forgotten genocides have wiped the slate clean, I have brought life and the promise of civilisation reborn.

The Mechanicus venerates those who draw closer to its vision of union with the God of all Machines, and they are right to do so.

But they have chosen the wrong deity.

By any mortal reckoning, I am a god.

So bold a statement could rightly be construed as arrogance.

In my case, it is modesty.

A simple statement of fact.

I am Archmagos Vettius Telok, and I am remaking what was lost.

Such is the power of my knowledge.

Barely worthy of being designated a planet, the doomed world hung in the fringes of Arcturus Ultra’s rapidly diminishing Kuiper belt at the farthest extent of the star system. Much of this spatial region was composed of frozen volatiles – drifting agglomerations of ice, ammonia and methane – and these were slowly being turned to vapour by the thermal death throes of the newly named star’s rapidly expanding corona. The Oort cloud had thinned to the point of vanishing altogether, allowing the vessels of the Kotov fleet to approach the system without fear of taking damage from the debris scattered like celestial litter at the system’s edge.

The dying planet had been christened Katen Venia, and its likely lifespan could be measured in months at best. It would soon be destroyed by the very star that had once nourished an unknown number of habitable worlds in that slender astronomical region named for a flaxen-haired thief of ancient myth.

The closest planets to the star had already been reduced to metallic vapour by its expanding heat corona and now only Katen Venia remained. Its outer layers of frozen nitrogen had almost entirely boiled off into space, exposing a surface of cratered ice and rock, soaring crystal growths of geometric beauty, abyssal canyons of sheared glaciers, and swathes of desolate tundra that had been ripped raw by the gravitational push and pull of its chaotic orbit.

Any currently uncontested method of celestial cartography would regard Katen Venia as an unremarkable world, a bare rock devoid of any notable features warranting attention. Only the study of its demise would be of any interest to most magi. Yet for all its apparent worthlessness, there was one aspect to Katen Venia that rendered it valuable beyond measure.

Telok the Machine-touched, whose explorator fleet had been lost with all hands, had come this way. Numerous legends of Mars spoke of his foolhardy quest into the unknown to unearth an ancient technological marvel known as the Breath of the Gods. Each tale was embellished with its own twist to Telok’s obsession, but all agreed that his quest had come to a bad end.

But a newly-revealed relic of his doomed expedition had come to light, offering tantalising hints that the Lost Magos had actually found something in the unknown reaches beyond the light of familiar stars: a saviour pod beacon indicating that the newly-named Katen Venia was the final resting place of Telok’s flagship, the Tomioka.

It was this that had brought an Adeptus Mechanicus explorator fleet of such magnitude as had not been assembled for millennia to leave the confines of the Milky Way and establish orbit around the planet’s northern polar regions.

The heart of this fleet was a vessel that could be called unique without fear of contradiction. A mighty star-borne colossus. A relic of a time when the mysteries of technology were not shrouded in a veil of ignorance, and whose violent birth had destroyed a world. Its inhuman scale was the product of men who dared to build the greatest things their imaginations could conceive.

Its name was Speranza, and it was Ark Mechanicus; the flagship of Archmagos Lexell Kotov.

Unlike the battleships built in the Imperium’s fortified shipyards, the Ark Mechanicus had not been wrought with any martial aesthetic in mind, nor had it accrued centuries of encrusted ornamentation to glorify long-dead saints or heroes of war. It was a vessel that would never be called beautiful, even by those who had built it, for it had no symmetry, no clean lines nor even much of a straight axis that allowed for spurious notions of aerodynamics.

The Speranza was a vessel forever bound to the void, and only the positioning of its vast plasma engines’ containment-field generators allowed an observer to know which end was the prow and which the stern. Its outer hull was a tangled arrangement of intestinal duct-work, exposed skeletal superstructure, and ray-shielded crew spaces. Its graceless topside and its bulbous underside were ribbed plateaus overgrown with geometric accretions of unchecked industry. Refineries, ore-processing plants, gene-holds, test ranges, manufactories, laboratoria, power generators and assembly forges clung to its flanks in a haphazard arrangement that owed nothing to any design philosophies other than need and practicality. The Speranza was a vessel of exploration and research, a mariner of the nebulae whose sole task was to be part of Kotov’s Quest for Knowledge.

Though the bulk of the Ark’s unimaginable mass was given over to the workings of technology and construction, it was not without teeth. Conventional munitions and rudimentary void-weaponry punctuated its length, but desperate need had revealed the presence of weapon technologies many magnitudes more lethal, secreted within lightless compartments long since forgotten by all save the ship itself.

The vessel was nothing less than a forge world cut loose from the surface of the planet whose death spasm had birthed it, a sprawling landmass of cathedrals to technology and the quintessential embodiment of the Cult Mechanicus’s devotion to the Omnissiah. At the heart of the Speranza was an electro-motive spirit formed from the gestalt conjoining of a trillion machines and more, a terrifyingly complex hybrid of intelligence and instinct that was close to godlike.

Like any representation of the divine, it had devotees.

A fleet of ancillary vessels kept station around the Speranza: fuel carriers, warships, troop transports, supply barques and a host of shuttles and bulk tenders that passed between them in strictly observed transit corridors. Moonchild and Wrathchild, twin reconditioned Gothic-class cruisers, patrolled the flanks of the Speranza, while Mortis Voss, the last survivor of the trio of vessels despatched from Voss Prime, drifted mournfully above the Ark’s dorsal manufactories.

Honour Blade had been lost in an emergency translation from the warp at the very edge of the galaxy, while Blade of Voss had been torn apart by a gravitational hell-storm during the nightmare crossing of the Halo Scar. Nor had these been the most grievous losses suffered by the fleet on its perilous journey to sail beyond the galactic boundary.

Cardinal Boras, a vessel of grand heritage that had braved the tempests of the warp from one side of the galaxy to the other, had been destroyed by ambushing eldar reavers. The Adeptus Astartes accompanying the fleet had likewise suffered grievous loss, for those selfsame reavers had gone on to board the Black Templars rapid strike cruiser that bore the proud name Adytum. Though the crusaders it carried had escaped to fight another day aboard the Thunderhawk Barisan, their Reclusiarch was slain as the Halo Scar’s crushing gravity waves claimed the ship’s corpse of steel and stone.

Those raiders had evaded the fleet’s retribution by the slenderest of margins, and the warships tasked with the Speranza’s protection were taking no chances of being caught out again.

One other vessel of note made up the last element of Archmagos Kotov’s fleet. Though nearly three kilometres in length, the Renard was insignificant in comparison to the hulking ships of the Mechanicus, but she was fast and built with a grace and poise the Speranza lacked.

Her shipmaster was Roboute Surcouf, and Katen Venia was the world he had named.

He would be the first to see its skies.

It was why he had come this far.

‘You know, for someone who lives in space, you’re bloody useless at putting on a void-suit,’ said Kayrn Sylkwood, enginseer of the Renard, refastening the seals of her captain’s bulky, baroquely-ornamented suit of exo-armour. ‘If I let you go outside like this you’ll be dead inside of thirty seconds.’

Roboute Surcouf shook his head. ‘I live inside a starship so I don’t have to wear a void-suit,’ he said, his voice sounding scratchy and distant through his helmet’s vox-grille.

Sylkwood wore the grey army fatigues and tight-fitting vest top of her former Cadian regiment, her broadly-built upper body permanently sheened with the oil, grease and incense of the propulsion decks that were as much a part of an enginseer’s uniform as any shoulder badge or rank pin. Functional communion augmetics made her shaven skull knotty with brutal implants, and haptic sub-dermals in her fingers and palms gave her a solid heft and a mean right hook.

She made one last circuit of Roboute, tugging at seams, adjusting pressure connectors and checking the suit’s internal atmospherics on the bulky backpack. Satisfied, she took a step back and nodded to herself.

‘Happy now?’ asked Roboute.

‘Moderately less irritated at your stupidity would be a better way of putting it.’

‘I can live with that,’ said Roboute, turning away and stomping over the deck to where Adara Siavash helped Magos Pavelka prep the grav-sled for the surface. Little more than a heavy, rectangular slab of metal with a pilot’s compartment at one end and a repulsor generator mounted underneath, the sled was the workhorse machine of the Renard. Its engine was rated for a cargo load of sixty metric tonnes and a volume of a hundred cubic metres, though it had been a long time since it had carried anything of such bulk. It floated on a cushion of distorted air that made Roboute’s teeth itch even through the protection of his void-suit.

Pavelka was cowled in the typical red robe of the Mechanicus, one that hid the majority of her augmetic qualities. Though Roboute had no idea of the full extent of her modification, he suspected it was a lot less than many of the Martian adepts aboard the Speranza. A number of feed-lines ran from a sparking power unit mounted on her back, and four concertinaing pipes expanded and contracted like bellows as they fed power into the sled’s batteries.

‘She ready?’ he asked, slapping an armoured hand against the grav-sled’s battered plates.

Pavelka flinched at the impact and said, ‘Admonishment: Need I remind you, captain, that to ascribe gender to machines is needless anthropomorphism? Machines have no need of flesh labels.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Adara, winking at the captain through the polarised faceplate of his own void-suit. ‘You can tell this is a grand old girl. Trust me, I know about the fairer sex.’

Sylkwood grinned and rubbed a metal palm on the thrumming fuselage as though it was her lover’s backside.

‘Gotta say, I agree with the lad,’ she said. ‘Not about him knowing anything about women. Trust me, he doesn’t know one interface port from another. But this machine’s reliable, right enough. She’s tough and won’t let you down in a tight spot. Sounds like a woman to me.’

Adara turned away to hide his embarrassment as Pavelka shook her head. ‘What else should I expect from an enginseer?’ she said, disconnecting her feed lines from the sled.

Sylkwood grinned and said, ‘Hard work, foul language and hangovers that’ll cripple an ork.’

Roboute set a foot onto the iron rungs hanging down from the sled’s crew cab and awkwardly hauled himself up into the pilot’s seat. Sylkwood clambered up after him and ran through the connection checklist with the thoroughness of a Sororitas dorm-mistress ensuring her novices were all abed.

Sylkwood was Cadian and thoroughness was her watchword.

‘Hey, how come you’re not checking my suit’s seals and tucking me in?’ said Adara, as he climbed onto the sled from the opposite side.

Without looking up, Sylkwood said, ‘Because you’re not the captain and I don’t much care if you explosively depressurise in a toxic environment.’

‘You’re cleaning the suit of piss and blood if he does,’ said Roboute, making a last adjustment to the sled’s surveyor gear.

‘How much on Adara having missed a seal?’ asked Sylkwood, looking back down at Pavelka.

‘You sound just like Mister Nader,’ answered Pavelka.

‘We left him up on the Renard,’ said Sylkwood. ‘Someone’s got to play the role of annoying idiot.’

‘In any case, it would not be a wager to me,’ said Pavelka. ‘Atmospheric readings tell me that Mister Siavash has his void-suit sealed within acceptable parameters.’

‘Good to know,’ said Adara.

The lad dropped into his bucket seat and strapped himself in next to Roboute. The boy had his ubiquitous butterfly blade tucked into one of his void-suit’s thigh pouches next to his holstered laspistol, and Roboute sighed.

‘Tell me you’re not so stupid as to carry an unsheathed knife in your suit,’ said Roboute.

Adara at least had the decency to look guilty as he pulled the blade out and placed it in a stowage box mounted on the inner face of the door.

‘Yeah, sorry. I don’t go anywhere without it, I kind of forget it’s even there.’

Magos Pavelka appeared at his side, filling the emergency oxygen tanks worked into the door’s structure. A coiling mechadendrite reached over her shoulder and opened the stowage box before a second articulated bronze limb capped with rotating callipers removed the offending blade.

‘Come on,’ said Adara. ‘What harm is there in leaving the knife there?’

‘Clarification: It is statistically probable that you will remove this weapon and carry it with you once you are beyond the hull of this vessel,’ said Pavelka, and even though much of her face had the porcelain quality of synth-skin and augmetic replacement, Roboute saw a glint of amusement in her clicking optics. ‘As Enginseer Sylkwood might say, “You have previous” and are not to be trusted.’

‘You cut me deep,’ said Adara.

‘You’d cut yourself deep,’ said Roboute, ‘and out there, that’d be a death sentence. Right, Ilanna?’

‘Unquestionably,’ answered the magos. ‘The atmosphere on the planet below is a volatile mix of frozen nitrogen being released from the ice-caps in both gaseous and liquid form, ammonia and airborne heavy metal particulates. The thermocline is shifting unpredictably in the ultra-rapid atmospheric bleed-off, resulting in squalling pressure vortices that would cause your body to react in a number of extremely unpleasant ways without your void-suit’s equalisation.’

‘I don’t know what a lot of that means, but I get the gist,’ said Adara.

‘Right, now you’ve scared us both half to death, how long before the tether gets us down there?’ asked Roboute, trying not to let his discomfort at the Renard’s cargo shuttle being reeled down onto the planet’s surface by remote means show in his voice. ‘I want to get out there and see what a world beyond the galaxy’s edge looks like.’

Pavelka cocked her head to the side, wordlessly communing with the Mechanicus controllers on the surface via the implants in her skull. Roboute’s brain had been augmented to view the invisible skeins of noospheric data, but only when interfacing with a spinal link system. The sled had no such array, and even if it did, he wouldn’t be able to connect with it through his void-suit.

‘Approximately ten minutes,’ said Pavelka. ‘Stratospheric disturbances and unexpected magnetic field storms are introducing chaotic variables into our ETA.’

Sylkwood dropped from the grav-sled’s running boards and shouted, ‘Clear the deck!’ though there was no one else in the shuttle’s cavernous loading bay. The few servitor cadres Roboute owned were otherwise engaged in monitoring the shuttle’s automated flight path or back aboard the Renard, repairing damage suffered during the navigation of the Halo Scar. Sylkwood scrambled up the service ladder to the upper gangway as Pavelka climbed onto the grav-sled, sitting behind Adara and producing a data-slate, which she rested upon her knees.

Roboute twisted awkwardly in his seat and said, ‘Everything set?’

‘Statement: yes,’ said Pavelka, extruding a mechanised auspex from a chest compartment.

‘You don’t have to come with us,’ said Roboute. ‘I know you don’t like leaving the Renard.’

Pavelka shook her head. ‘I modified the memory coil circuitry of the Tomioka’s distress beacon. I can follow its telemetry better than anyone else. Besides, if this sled breaks down, you will need me to fix it.’

‘Good to know,’ said Roboute, quietly grateful to have Pavelka along for the ride.

‘Don’t you need a suit?’ asked Adara.

Pavelka shook her head. ‘I have altered the filtration protocols of my lungs to exclude the toxic elements of the atmosphere, and am currently modifying my biochemistry to nullify the negative effects of hostile pressures. My body mass incorporates so little organic mass that requires oxygenation that I can store enough reserve within my mechanised volume.’

‘Good to know,’ said Adara in imitation of Roboute.

Roboute looked up to the upper gantry of the cargo bay, seeing Sylkwood open one of the hold’s vacuum-sealed doors. She sketched a quick salute to him, but said nothing as she slammed the heavy door behind her.

Clearly Kayrn Sylkwood felt no need to mark this moment with any significant words.

But Roboute knew this particular moment was special.

The three of them would soon pilot the sled onto the surface of an alien world that lay beyond the edges of the Milky Way, a world unclaimed by the Imperium. A world that had, until the coming of Telok’s fleet thousands of years ago, probably never known the tread of human feet. This was why Roboute had come this far and risked so much, to see alien skies and touch the earth of a planet so far from the understanding of the Imperium.

An emerald light on the walnut and brass control panel winked with an incoming transmission, and Roboute flicked the ivory-tipped switch next to it into the receive position. The voice of the expedition’s leader, Archmagos Lexell Kotov, trilled from the speaker grille.

‘Mister Surcouf,’ said Kotov. ‘Are you planning on joining us aboard the Tabularium?’

Roboute grinned, hearing the febrile edge of excitement in the archmagos’s voice. Though Kotov was the master of this explorator fleet, it had been Roboute’s retrieval of the locator beacon that had brought them this far.

‘I think we’d rather make our own way to the Tomioka,’ said Roboute. ‘But thank you for the invitation, it’s very thoughtful of you.’

‘Your tether shows significant margin for error in your arrival time,’ said Telok.

‘So I gather, but Magos Pavelka reckons we’ll be planet side in around ten minutes.’

‘How imprecise. Kotov out,’ replied the archmagos.

Of all the many ways to be carried into battle, Brother-Sergeant Tanna relished the sudden fury of a Thunderhawk assault the most. Nothing stirred his heart more than the violent thrust of howling engines, the jolting motion of evasive manoeuvres and the sudden, screaming deceleration as the pilot flared the wings and slammed down into the crucible of combat. Being thrown around the inside of a Rhino or Land Raider just couldn’t compare, and Tanna didn’t know any Techmarine that could drive worth a damn anyway.

Yes, a gunship assault every time.

Even if this particular descent was – for now – being controlled by a Mechanicus e-mag tether.

The crew compartment of the Barisan was as cold as a meat locker, and a fine mist of condensing vapours slowly beaded the curved plates of Tanna’s midnight-black armour with droplets of moisture. A cross of purest jet gleamed on one ivory shoulder guard and an eagle carved from the same material stood proud on the other. An embossed red skull was set in the centre of the eagle’s breast, its eyes glinting shards of deeper garnet. Liquid streaks coated the angular planes of his helmet like tears, but Tanna had not wept in over two hundred years.

Alone in his makeshift arming chamber aboard the Speranza he had come close.

The Thunderhawk lurched, slammed sideways by rogue vortices of surging gases being stripped from the planet’s surface. The atmospherics of Katen Venia were growing increasingly turbulent and toxic; a mix of intolerably high nitrogen levels and vaporous metals utterly lethal to mortals. Tanna’s post-human physiology had been engineered to survive hostile environments, but even he would struggle to survive in Katen Venia’s atmosphere for more than a few hours.

The Barisan wasn’t flying an assault run, but its descent was scarcely less steep and juddering than any combat drop Tanna had previously made in its belly. The gunship’s frame had been struck in the Tyrrhenus Mons forge-complex on Mars, and bore the seal of the Fabricator General himself. Its machine-spirit was a tempestuous thing, part unbroken colt, part wounded grox – aggression and wildness combined. Such qualities had served the Fighting Company well in past crusades, but the gunship still grieved the loss of its carrier and had yet to settle in its new home aboard the Speranza.

Much like the rest of us, thought Tanna, casting a quick glance down the length of the fuselage.

A Thunderhawk was built to carry three Codex-strength squads into the heart of battle, but most of the Barisan’s grav-restraints were empty. Only six of the thirty seats were occupied. Tanna sat on the commander’s bench next to the gunship’s assault ramp, his helmet fixed in place and his chained bolter held rigid at his side.

Brother Yael sat two seats down from him, cradling his boltgun close to his chest. The youngest of their number, Yael had only recently been raised to the ranks of the Fighting Company, chosen by Helbrecht himself to take part in the Scar Crusade. The bout the young warrior had fought on the Speranza’s training deck against Magos Dahan was one Tanna would never forget. Not least for the fact that the Mechanicus Secutor had conceded defeat.

The ivory-armoured form of Apothecary Auiden was a splash of white in the darkness, and he looked up at Tanna with a grim nod as he slotted home bronze-lined phials into the mechanism of his narthecium gauntlet. This was not a combat drop, but when descending to an unknown world Auiden took the view that it was better to expect the worst than face it unprepared.

A pessimistic outlook, but one that had yet to be proven wrong on this ill-fated crusade.

The solemn-hearted Bracha sat with his head bowed and his hands laced together as if in prayer. First on the field and the last to leave, Kul Gilad’s death had hit Bracha hardest of all. He had known the Reclusiarch the longest, having fought six crusades to victory at his side. Many had believed he would follow Kul Gilad’s example and take the rosarius.

One of Bracha’s hands was flesh and blood, the other fashioned from chrome-plated steel. A flesh-clad cybork on the Valette Manifold station had cut Bracha’s arm from him, but he had taken the loss without complaint. The life of a Space Marine was one of extreme violence, and no Black Templar expected to live out his days without suffering some terrible injury along the way. Magos Dahan had crafted Bracha a replacement arm, a skitarii-pattern combat limb with an implanted plasma gun in the forearm.

Along from Bracha, Issur the Bladesman ran his hands along the crimson sheath of his power sword as he always did when locked into a harness within an assault craft. Its texture was patterned with a recurring crusader chain motif, and as Tanna watched, Issur’s head twitched and the fingers stroking the scabbard spasmed suddenly. Issur clenched his fist in anger and slammed his helmeted head back against the gunship’s fuselage.

Like Bracha, Issur had been wounded in the fight against the cyborks, his body shocked to the brink of death by a weaponised electromagnetic generator. The swordsman was lucky to be alive, but he had come back from the brink of death with misfiring synapses and a nervous system that was no longer entirely reliable. His career as a duellist was over, and Tanna couldn’t help but notice the envious glances Issur threw out in the direction of Atticus Varda.

The Emperor’s Champion sat unmoving in his grav-restraint, the Black Sword resting across his knees. Sheathed in a scabbard of unbreakable Martian alloys, only its leather-wrapped hilt and crusader cross pommel were visible. The blade was a midnight razor, filigreed with Gothic scriptwork.

Issur had fully expected to wield the Black Sword, for he had once been the best among them with a blade. But which Templar was called to serve as Emperor’s Champion depended on more than just skill at arms, and the war-visions had not come to him. The Master of Mankind had chosen Atticus Varda to be His Champion, and no Black Templar would dream of gainsaying such authority.

Varda sat across from Tanna, clad in armour the colour of darkest night, handcrafted in the forges of the Eternal Crusader by Techmarine Lexne and an army of thralls nearly three thousand years ago. Its plates were moulded in the form of an idealised physique, the eagle at its chest golden and proud. The Chapter’s icon was rendered in pearlescent stone quarried from the dark side of Luna. Just to be in its presence was an honour.

Tanna had seen many fine suits of armour in his centuries of service, but he had seen no finer examples of the artificer’s art than this. Aelius had worn it well, but it fitted Varda like a second skin.

The Emperor’s Champion was the heart of a Crusade, and Varda’s had been broken by the death of Kul Gilad, a brave warrior slain without his brothers at his side. Sensing Tanna’s scrutiny, he looked up and the ember-red eye lenses of their battle-helms met across the juddering fuselage.

‘Something on your mind, Tanna?’ asked Varda.

The words sounded in Tanna’s helmet on a closed channel; none of the others would hear what passed between them.

‘The Champion carries the soul of us all,’ said Tanna. ‘That’s what Kul Gilad used to say.’

‘Repeating his words does not make you him,’ said Varda, gripping the Black Sword tightly.

‘No,’ agreed Tanna. ‘Nor would I have it so.’

‘Then why speak them?’

‘To show you that I grieve for him also.’

‘Not enough,’ hissed Varda. ‘His blood is on our hands.’

Anger touched Tanna. ‘If we had gone to him, we would all be dead.’

‘Better to fall in battle than to run from it.’

‘Kul Gilad ordered us from the ship,’ said Tanna. ‘You heard him. We all did.’

‘We should have fought alongside our Reclusiarch.’

Tanna nodded and said, ‘Aye, and our deaths would have been glorious.’

Varda made a fist on the scabbard of the Black Sword. ‘Then why did you not give the order?’

‘Because I was following the Reclusiarch’s last order,’ snapped Tanna, lifting his right arm to show the metallic links binding his boltgun to his wrist. ‘Our command structure exists for a reason, Varda, and the moment we start picking and choosing which orders we obey, we might as well tear the Chapter symbol from our shoulders and set a course for the Maelstrom. We are Black Templars, and we willingly bind ourselves with chains of duty, chains of honour and chains of death. You are the Emperor’s Champion, Varda. You know this better than anyone.’

Varda’s head sank, and Tanna saw the fire of his anger had dimmed. It was not, Tanna knew, truly anger that fuelled his words, but guilt.

A guilt they all shared, whether it was deserved or not.

Tanna heard Varda’s soul-weary sigh over the vox. ‘I know you are right, Tanna, but Kul Gilad anointed me,’ he said, looking up. ‘And you will always be the one who kept me from his death.’

‘I am the one that kept you alive,’ said Tanna.

Five hours ago, the surface region chosen for Mechanicus landing fields had been nothing more than a vaguely flat plateau of retreating glacial ice and a dozen gradually vaporising lakes of exotically lethal chemistry. A host of servitor-crewed drones launched as the Speranza spiralled into its high-anchor position had provided three-dimensional pict-captures of the global topography, and deep-penetrating orbital augurs of the planet’s northern hemisphere had enabled Archmagos Kotov to select this particular landing site.

The specific uniformity of the plateau’s underlying bedrock and its relative geological stability put it well within the terraforming capabilities of Fabricatus Turentek’s geoformer engines. Three colossal vessels detached from the underside of the Speranza, falling away like spalling portions of wreckage in the wake of catastrophic damage. Each was a ten-kilometre-square slab of barely understood machinery; titanic atmosphere processing plants, industrial-scale meltas and arcane technologies of geological manipulation. Like gothic factories cast adrift in space, the geoformer engines dropped through the atmosphere, their heat-shielded undersides glowing a fierce cherry red as they negotiated the turbulent storms of escaping gases.

They halted their descent a hundred metres above the ground, bombarding the site with terrain-mapping augurs to verify their position. Manoeuvring jets fired corrective bursts as serried banks of planet-cracking cannons rotated outwards in their undersides. Precision ordnance strikes smashed the frozen ice of the surface into manageable chunks with thunderous barrages as the wide mouths of furnace-meltas irised open.

A rippling haze of intense heat was expelled like the breath of mythical dragons, and painfully bright light flared from the meltas, filling the plateau with purple-edged fire. Hurricanes of superheated steam shrieked and hissed as the surface ice was boiled away or diverted into drainage channels blasted by terrain-modifying howitzers.

Chemical mortars fired thousands of air-bursting saturation shells, seeding the local atmosphere with slow-decaying absorption matter that began a cascade of alchemical reactions to filter out its most toxic and corrosive elements. Wide-mouthed bays opened on the geoformer vessels and scores of heavy-grade earth-moving leviathans were dropped to the planet’s surface in impact-cushioning cradles.

In a carefully orchestrated ballet, the earth-moving machines swiftly demarcated the area of the landing fields and set about their work with the efficiency of an army of iron-skinned and hazard-striped worker ants. Turentek had crafted hundreds of landing fields on worlds far more inimical to life and machines than Katen Venia and the priests under his command knew their trade well.

Slowly the last of the ice was blasted clear and thousands of kilometres of cabling were laid to receive the telemetry gear required to tether the incoming vessels to their assigned landing zones. With the buried infrastructure in place and protected within hardened ductwork, the exposed rock was crushed and planed flat with tight-focus conversion beamers. Heat-shielding was laid over the buried technology as ten thousand atmosphere-capable tech-priests with implanted precision meltas and polishing limbs applied the final smoothing to the surface of the landing fields with ångström-level precision. Vacuum-suited servitors followed in the wake of the tech-priests, acid-etching the rock with Imperial eagles, cog-wreathed machine skulls and coded sequence numbers.

Within four hours, a vast square of mirror-smooth rock, six kilometres on each side, had been carved into the planet’s surface. With the basic structure in place, entoptic generators and noospheric transmission arrays were installed, as well as numerous fully-equipped control bunkers to manage the intricate and necessarily complex scheduling of incoming and departing landing craft. Defence towers were raised at regular intervals around the landing fields, each one equipped with an array of weapons capable of engaging ships in low orbit or attacking ground forces.

To enable non-Mechanicus drop ships to set down, contrasting guide lines were painted on the smoothed rock, together with conventional landing lights and active e-mag tethers. Five hours after the work had begun, it was complete, and Magos Turentek set his seal upon the work from his articulated fabrication hangar in the ventral manufactory districts of the Speranza.

No sooner was Turentek’s seal inloaded to the Manifold, than the first craft were launched from the embarkation hangars of the Ark Mechanicus. A hundred fat-bellied landers began their descent to the surface carrying the mechanisms of planetary exploration: tech-priests and their monstrous land-cathedrals, skitarii battalions and their war machines, servitors and weaponised praetorians.

Amid the host of iron descending to the planet’s surface, three coffin ships of the Legio Sirius were shepherded down through the atmosphere by supplicant vessels that howled binaric hymnals of praise and warning across multiple wavelengths.

The Warlord Lupa Capitalina descended to Katen Venia, attended by Amarok and Vilka.

Wintersun would have the honour of First Step, as was his right as Legio Alpha. Skinwalker and Ironwoad would share in this honour, and if either Warhound princeps felt any reservations at the exclusion of Moonsorrow and Canis Ulfrica, they kept such thoughts to themselves.

An airborne armada of steel and gold descended to the planet on towering plumes of blue-limned fire, a billion tonnes of machinery and men.

The Adeptus Mechanicus had come to Katen Venia.

Apart from a near-miss with the traversing arm of lifter-rig Wulfse, the latest shift in the distribution hub of Magos Turentek’s forge-temple had gone well. Abrehem had kept up with the punishing schedule insisted on by the materiel-logisters, and even managed to work some contingency time into their schedule to start transferring the newly-built Cadian tanks down-ship.

Abrehem unstrapped himself from Virtanen’s command throne and began the painful process of unplugging the dozens of cerebral-communion cables trailing from the command headpiece he wore. With each wincing disconnect, the crisp noospheric sensorium displaying the lifter-rig’s traverse lines, tension/compression ratios, load levels and spool length faded slowly from his field of vision.

With the last connector unplugged, Abrehem gathered up a battered set of aural bafflers and pressed them over his ears before swinging out onto the iron-rung ladder bolted to the latticework tower of the lifter-rig. The commander’s cab was nearly a hundred and fifty metres above the deck, but Abrehem felt no sense of vertigo; he’d worked the rigs on Joura too long for any fear of heights to remain.

The multiple arms of the lifter-rig splayed out from his control cab like the rigid steel tentacles of a high-viz squid. All ten of Virtanen’s two hundred metre arms were capable of ascending and descending, rotating through three hundred and sixty degrees or articulating in more convoluted ways as its operator desired. Each arm was equipped with a multitude of attachments: basic hooks, magnets, a variety of cutting and welding tools, as well as more specialised mechadendrite-enabled manipulator claws.

Virtanen was a relatively small machine, but it was sturdy, reliable and had a hefty load capacity that belied its smaller stature compared to the titanic lifting rigs worked by Turentek himself. Its service history and structural integrity rating were both impressive and its machine-spirit appeared only too eager to accept a new controller.

But it was no Savickas. That had been a lifter-rig without limits, an unrelenting workhorse of a machine that seemed to anticipate every command before it was issued and never, ever, failed to link with a shipping container first time.

According to Totha Mu-32, the previous incumbent of Abrehem’s new command throne had been killed during the attack of the eldar pirates.

‘I think Virtanen was waiting for you,’ Totha Mu-32 had said when Abrehem first sat in the command throne. ‘Its name means “small river”, but even the smallest river can cut a mountain in half given time, yes? I think you will get along very well.’

Abrehem had no answer to that, and merely shrugged, still uncomfortable at the notion that people thought him Machine-touched. He certainly didn’t feel any intimate connection to the godhood of all machines. Totha Mu-32 had told him that such men as he were rare indeed, bringing a deeply implanted electoo up to the surface of his organics, a depiction of a coiled dragon with silver and bronze scales.

When Abrehem asked the overseer what the tattoo represented, Totha Mu-32 told him it was the mark of a proscribed Martian sect that made it their business to seek out and worship Machine-touched individuals. Archmagos Telok, the object of this voyage of exploration, was said to be so blessed, and shipboard rumour had it that Magos Blaylock likewise had the eye of the Omnissiah upon him. To have a trinity of such individuals connected to this voyage was seen as a sign of great import by Totha Mu-32, a physical manifestation of the Originator, the Scion and the Motive Force.

Abrehem listened to Totha Mu-32’s sermons in silence, finding the overseer’s zeal for his beatification misplaced and more than a little off-putting.

He certainly had no sense that he was in any way special.

The hard metal of a bionic arm grafted to his right shoulder seemed to mock that belief.

The augmetic limb had been fitted after a contraband plasma pistol that shouldn’t have been able to fire had explosively overheated and melted the flesh and bone from his body after he’d used it to shoot dead an eldar warrior-chief. He didn’t like to think of that moment, the bowel-loosening terror of the xeno-killers descending upon them, only to be cut apart into bloody chunks by a cyborg death machine that had apparently adopted him as its new master. His plea to Sebastian Thor and his bloody handprint had opened the door to the arco-flagellant’s dormis chamber, which Totha-Mu 32 and a great many others were taking as a sign of his divine favour.

Abrehem shook off thoughts of Totha Mu-32’s reverence, knowing that a moment’s inattention could cost him his life when he was hundreds of metres above a hard steel deck.

He worked his way down the ladder, and even with the aural bafflers the noise in the forge-temple was almost deafening. Heavy machinery sprouted like the towering skeletal remains of vast-necked sauropods around the temple’s perimeter, and arch-backed rigs rumbled overhead on suspended rails, hauling containers weighing thousands of tonnes back and forth with no more effort than a Cadian might carry his kit-bag. Magos Turentek himself worked across the centre-line of the forge-temple, handling the largest and heaviest containers personally. His multiple loader arms depended from a central machine-hub where the organic components of his body were interred like the biological scraps of a god-machine’s princeps.

Most of the containers being loaded onto the vast-hulled shipping rigs contained modular plates of adamantium and structural members intended for the lower decks. Kilometres of hull plating had been torn from the Speranza by the crossing of the Halo Scar and the guns of the eldar warship – rendering entire districts of the Ark Mechanicus uninhabitable. The prow forges were producing millions of metric tonnes of desperately-needed components for the ship’s repair crews, but Abrehem’s experienced eye saw the pace was slowing as the Speranza’s supply of raw materials was increasingly depleted.

Abrehem reached one of the transit walkways on the cliff-like walls of the forge-temple and took a moment to catch his breath. The air here was bitter and electrical, with an acrid chemical tang that left the men working here with raspingly sore throats and increased breathing difficulties. This, combined with months spent below decks and working backbreaking shifts in the reclamation halls or plasma refuelling details with little sleep and only nutrient paste to sustain him, had robbed Abrehem of his once robust physique. Daily doses of Hawke’s shine didn’t help, but sometimes it was the only thing that knocked him out enough to sleep.

He rubbed a hand over his shorn scalp, a decision he and his fellow bondsman had taken in a fit of righteous indignation to turn them into the drones the Mechanicus believed them to be. Though their actions during the eldar attack had improved their lot somewhat, Abrehem’s anger at the inhuman treatment of the below-deck bondsmen still smouldered like a banked fire. Kept as slaves and regarded simply as assets, numbers and mortal resources, the bondsmen existed in a nightmare that would only end with their death.

The Mechanicus believed its bondsmen were honoured to serve the Omnissiah this way!

Abrehem spat a wad of oily phlegm and climbed back onto the ladder. Below, he could see Coyne and Hawke clambering down towards the deck from their sub-control cabs, where they managed the articulation and linkage of the various connectors to whatever was being transported.

Awaiting them on the deck were two hooded figures, one robed in the red and gold of a Mechanicus overseer, the other swathed in the black cloak of a death penitent. Both looked up at him with a measure of devotion. Abrehem relished speaking to neither of them, not that Rasselas X-42 ever spoke much.

Eventually he reached the deck, and took another breath of chem-scented air.

‘A successful shift,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Virtanen has bonded well with you.’

‘It’s a good rig,’ replied Abrehem. ‘Smaller than we’re used to, but it’s got heart.’

‘It’s no Savickas,’ said Coyne, echoing Abrehem’s earlier sentiment.

Hawke shrugged. ‘One lifter’s much like another,’ he said.

‘Shows how much you know rigs,’ said Abrehem. ‘What was it you did on Joura again?’

‘As little as possible would be my bet,’ quipped Coyne, rolling his shoulders to ease the itching of the synth-skin grafts on his back where he’d taken a razored fragment from a ricocheting eldar projectile.

‘Damn straight,’ said Hawke with a wink. ‘After the regiment tossed me out, I worked Cargo-8s mostly, driving the containers between the depots and the sub-orbitals. Though that was grunt work compared to being a moderati on a lifter-rig.’

Abrehem sent an amused glance at Coyne, and his fellow rigman hid a grin at Hawke’s boyish enthusiasm for working the lifter-rigs. Give it a month of monotony and he’d soon think twice about rating his job in the sub-cab as being anything close to a Titan moderati’s role.

‘May I?’ asked Totha Mu-32, reaching up to examine the raw flesh at Abrehem’s temples and forehead. Abrehem nodded and Rasselas X-42 bristled at the overseer’s familiar touch. He waved the arco-flagellant to submission. It didn’t matter how many times Abrehem reinforced that certain people weren’t to be considered threats, Rasselas X-42 still viewed everyone who came near him as a potential assassin.

Though now clad in baggy fatigues, heavy work boots and a kevlar vest machined to his impossibly muscular form, Rasselas X-42 could never be mistaken for anything other than the slaughterman he was. Though currently obscured by the wide sleeves of his penitent’s robe, his gauntlet-hands were silver-sheened electro-flails capable of tearing through steel and bone with equal ease. The back and crown of his skull were sheathed in metal and a circular Cog Mechanicus of blood-red iron stood proud on his forehead. Sharpened metal teeth glinted in the shadows beneath his hood and flickering combat-optics shimmered with a faint cherry red glow.

‘You know there is no need for you to wear the command headset,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘If you concentrate more fully, the augmetic eyes you inherited from your father can display the datasphere more efficiently.’

Abrehem nodded. ‘I know, but I’m not confident enough in my control over the noospheric inloads to feel comfortable commanding Virtanen by them alone.’

‘You are Machine-touched,’ asked Totha Mu-32. ‘Trust in the Omnissiah and it will come.’

‘If that bastard’s bloody Machine-touched, then how come he damn near smashed into our rig’s arm?’ said a rasping voice.

Abrehem turned as a gang of six men appeared around the corner of Virtanen’s wide baseplate. All six wore bondsmen coveralls and had the same gaunt-faced meanness common to the Speranza’s below-deck crew. Three men sported augmetics on their arms and craniums, while the rest were ornamented with rig-tattoos, mohawks and ritual brow piercings. They carried heavy power wrenches and other, similarly brutal-looking tools.

Pulsing just beneath the skin of the man who’d spoken was a wolf-head electoo, crudely applied and fuzzed with bio-electric static. He carried a buzzing mag-hammer in his piston-boosted arms and looked like he knew how to use it in a tight spot.

‘Wulfse,’ said Abrehem.

‘You’re the sons of bitches that almost hit us!’ snapped Hawke. ‘What in the name of Thor’s backside are blind idiots like you doing running a lifter-rig?’

Hawke’s vehemence caught the men by surprise, but for all his bluster, their newest rigman was right. The near miss had been the fault of Wulfse’s crew, but it didn’t look like they were in the mood to hear that.

‘Listen,’ said Abrehem. ‘Nothing happened, right? Nobody got hurt and we’ll all be a bit more careful next time, right?’

‘There ain’t going to be a next time,’ snarled the lead rigman of the Wulfse. ‘Only thing you’ll be driving is a medicae gurney.’

Totha Mu-32’s floodstream surged with binaric authority signifiers.

‘You men are to return to your posts immediately,’ he said. ‘If there has been an infraction of rig safety protocols, I assure you those responsible will be assigned the required punishment.’

‘Stay out of this, overseer,’ warned the man, hefting the mag-hammer onto his shoulder. ‘Rigmen sort out their own discipline.’

That at least was true, reflected Abrehem, but right now he wished it wasn’t.

The man launched himself at Abrehem, bringing the mag-hammer around in a brutal arc.

Abrehem felt a rush of movement and a black blur shot past him. He flinched as a whipcrack of electrical discharge snapped the air. When he looked up, the lead rigman of Wulfse was pinned to the side of Virtanen’s baseplate.

Rasselas X-42’s left arm was extended ramrod straight, his stiffened electro-flails impaling the man through his shoulder and holding him a metre off the deck. The rigman’s coveralls were soaked with blood and his face was bleached of colour by pain and shock. Rasselas X-42 drew back his right arm, the flails whipping out to form slicing claws of crackling metal.

‘Live or die?’ asked the arco-flagellant.

Between sobs of agony, the rigman screamed, ‘Live!’

Rasselas X-42 leaned in close, his killer’s eyes and pulsing Cog Mechanicus bathing the man’s face in a blood red glow.

‘He’s not talking to you,’ said Abrehem. ‘He’s asking me if he should kill you.’

‘No, please!’ yelled the man, desperately trying not to struggle and tear the wounds in his shoulder wider. ‘Don’t kill me!’

The rest of Wulfse’s crew backed away from the arco-flagellant, terrified of its unnatural speed and power. Chem-shunts had elevated along its arms, sub-dermal adrenal boosters ready to kick the bio-mechanical killer into combat mode. Anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in the path of a rampaging arco-flagellant was almost certainly dead, and rumours of how thoroughly Rasselas X-42 had slaughtered the eldar boarders had spread through the under decks like a virus.

The shared aggression in Wulfse’s crew drained away like oil through a perforated sump. They dropped their makeshift weapons and backed away with their hands up.

‘Put him down, X-42,’ said Abrehem. ‘This one’s not going to cause any more problems, are you?’

The man shook his head, biting his lip to keep from screaming out.

The arco-flagellant’s flail claws snapped back into his gauntlets and the man dropped to the deck with a bellow of agony. His hand clamped down on his wounded shoulder and he scrambled away after his fellow rigmen, casting fearful glances back at the arco-flagellant as though he expected it to pounce on him once his back was turned.

Rasselas X-42 ignored him and pulled his hood up over his head.

Hawke whooped with glee, bent double with mirth.

‘Did you see the look on his face?’ he managed between laughs. ‘Thor’s balls, I though he was going to shit his britches!’

The arco-flagellant came to stand at Abrehem’s shoulder, and the stink of its chemically-stimulated physiology was a powerfully astringent reek. By now, a crowd had gathered to watch the altercation, but they backed off as the arco-flagellant’s dead-eyed stare swept over them like a butcher eyeing choice cuts of meat.

Abrehem saw that as many faces were lined in fear as were lit with adoration.

‘We should return X-42 to his dormis chamber so that I may attempt to re-engage the pacifier helm,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘I should not have allowed him to remain at your side. That bondsman is fortunate to be alive.’

‘He wasn’t hurt too bad, and he’ll not bother us again,’ said Coyne.

‘You misunderstand,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Wulfse’s overseer will hear of this. As shall high-ranking magi who will not think it fit that a mere under-deck bondsman claims stewardship over an arco-flagellant. And when they discover I gave you an augmetic arm, we will both be in trouble.’

‘What do you think they’ll do?’ asked Abrehem.

‘They will come to remove X-42 from your presence. And your arm.’

‘I’d like to see them try,’ said Hawke, lifting a hand to lay a comradely slap on the arco-flagellant’s shoulder. Rasselas X-42’s head snapped around, sharpened iron teeth bared, and Hawke’s hand dropped back to his side.

‘Yes,’ said Abrehem, with grim relish. ‘Let them try.’

‘Open her up,’ said Roboute, and Pavelka unlaced the security systems keeping the atmosphere within the cargo bay breathable. The lights surrounding the tall rhomboidal outline of the embarkation ramp flared in a rotating display of amber warnings. A depressurisation alarm blared through the deck, in case they had suddenly been struck blind. Cable stays vibrated in the sudden evacuation of air from the deck, and Roboute felt his ears pop with the equalisation of pressure to the outside world.

Even through the heating elements woven into the fabric of his void-suit, he felt the stabbing chill of the world beyond. Amber light changed to red, though the unambiguous nature of the warning would have been wasted on anyone still in the cargo bay, as the lack of atmospheric pressure would already be killing them.

Metres-thick pistons either side of the embarkation door groaned and pushed the heavy slab of metal outwards, forming a ridged ramp down to the surface of the planet. The glaring brightness of reflected sunlight on ice made Roboute blink in shock until the polarisation filters in his helmet dimmed.

‘Let’s see what a world beyond the galaxy looks like,’ said Roboute, driving out of the shuttle and into a city of iron and noise, arcing lightning and mountains of beaten iron that were surely too large to have any hope of moving.

A starport metropolis.

That was Roboute’s first impression upon disembarking from the Renard’s shuttle. The grav-sled slid gracefully over hexagonal sheets of honeycomb plates, typical of every landing field in the Imperium, and came to an abrupt halt as he eased up on the power to the engines.

‘Why are we stopping?’ asked Magos Pavelka. ‘Is there a problem?’

Roboute twisted in the seat of the grav-sled, and his answer was stillborn as he saw how ashen the magos’s skin had become.

‘My dermal layer is being reinforced to withstand variant radiation levels, pressure and temperature,’ she said, pre-empting his inevitable question.

‘Ah, okay then,’ he said, marshalling his thoughts to answer Pavelka’s original question in a manner that wouldn’t sound churlish or disappointed. He gave up after a few moments, turning back around to watch scores of boxy containers being offloaded from Mechanicus cargo-barques by exo-armoured servitors. Tracked fuel tenders moved past crackling void-generators along precisely defined routes, while a host of lifter-rigs stacked the ever-growing mass of materiel in hardened supply depots. Sealed Cadian transports rolled from the vast bellies of Imperial Guard drop ships, their hull integrity checked by Mechanicus logisters before being allowed onwards.

No trace of Katen Venia’s surface could be seen beyond the encroachments of the Mechanicus, giving no clue that this was an unexplored world in the last moments of its existence.

‘It just looks like any other fleet muster centre,’ he said.

‘What did you expect it to look like?’ asked Pavelka. Roboute shrugged, no easy feat in a bulky void-suit. The exhilaration of discovering worlds and opening up uncharted regions of space had never left Roboute, no matter how many new skies and unspoiled vistas of distant worlds he saw. Though the landing fields were thronged with robed adepts, grey-skinned servitors and bustling activity, he saw nothing that resembled excitement, only the monotonous duty of routinely familiar tasks.

‘I thought this place would be different,’ said Roboute. ‘We’re exploring a new world, after all.’

‘An unfamiliar environment is all the more reason to work by established methodologies.’

Roboute knew it was pointless to try and convey that a singular moment of history was being trampled beneath the grinding, rote efficiency of the Mechanicus, but felt he had to try.

‘This is a world beyond the galaxy, Ilanna,’ said Roboute. ‘We’re the first human beings to come to this world in over three thousand years. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

‘This is a significant world in terms of what might be learned, I agree, but geologically it is just like any other: a metallic core, layers of rock and ice. No different to any planetary body within the arbitrary geographical boundaries of Imperial space. Soon the star’s expanding corona will envelop it. And then it will be gone.’

‘I can’t explain it in any way you’d grasp, Ilanna, but this is a moment that should be savoured and recorded. When mariners sailed the farthest oceans of Old Earth, there wasn’t a man among them who didn’t feel a sense of wonder at what they were seeing. If they returned alive, they were feted as heroes, intrepid explorers who’d seen people and places they couldn’t imagine when they set out.’

‘This moment is being recorded,’ said Pavelka. ‘In more ways than you can comprehend.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘I am aware of that.’

Roboute shook his head in exasperation at Pavelka’s literalness, but before he could say anything else to convince her she was missing the point, screaming engines split the air with deafening thunder like a sonic boom.

‘What the…?’ was all he managed before a host of emergency lights began flashing on the control towers of the landing fields and a host of vapour flares banged off into the sky to warn approaching aircraft of an unauthorised flight path.

‘What was that?’ asked Adara, shielding his visor with his gauntlet to get a better look at the black and ivory blur climbing over the glittering peaks of nitrogen glaciers.

The screaming aircraft vanished from sight, but Roboute knew exactly what it was.

‘That’s a Thunderhawk,’ he said. ‘The damn Templars are going in ahead of us!’

‘It seems their crusading zeal extends to voyages of exploration as well as campaigns of war,’ observed Pavelka.

‘Bloody Tanna,’ swore Roboute. ‘Archmagos Kotov promised us the right of first passage.’

‘Doesn’t look like the Templars know that,’ said Adara.

Roboute slammed a fist on the control panel in frustration. To have come all this way only for someone else to reach their destination first was beyond galling, it was a bitter blow to everything he’d set out to achieve.

‘Corollary: I think any disappointment you are feeling will soon abate,’ said Pavelka, looking out over the landing fields.

‘What are you talking about?’

Pavelka pointed over his shoulder. ‘Because the Land Leviathans are coming out.’

Click here to buy Lords of Mars

For Nik, Lorraine, Dan, Laura, Rob, Gemma and Jo at the Village for keeping me heavily caffeinated and letting me hog the big table all the time.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

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

Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak

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