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Myriad – Rob Sanders

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Myriad

Rob Sanders

The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.

Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty God-Machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.

Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.

But those mass conveyors would not come.

With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.

Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.

A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such God-Machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.

Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as the Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of the Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.

It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.

Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eye patch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chain-blade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.

‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.

The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.

It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.

In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.

When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.

‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.

‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main drive. Open outer doors.’

The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.

Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’

The structure was swarming with afflicted constructs going about their duties, and before long Lennox and her rebels found themselves fighting up through the blind spots and gauntlets of the scaffold interior. Meanwhile, heavily armed security forces – drawn from their perimeter posts by the Mole’s emergence – were running across the assembly yards and converging upon the Titan.

The compartments and ladderwells of the towering complex were filled with the cacophony gunfire. The Omnissian Faithful had to make use of whatever untainted weaponry they could scavenge and could not afford god-pleasing uniformity. Laslocks blasted bolts across the darkness of the decks. Shells from stub-carbines tore up through catwalks. Arc rifles threw streams of lightning along gantries. Lennox anticipated the arrival of the rebels by tearing grenades from her bandolier and throwing them up through the ladderwells and into the levels above.

The Ajax Abominata, even in the final stages of its dread assembly, was what she had come to expect from a corrupted God-Machine, swarming with twisted artisans prattling scrapcode and insanity.

The rebels moved up at speed and with merciless gunfire delivered at point-blank range. The corrupted army of constructs tending the monstrous Titan were ill-equipped to repel such a direct attack. The assembly yard’s security forces and shock troops hadn’t entertained the possibility of an attack on Temple-Tarantyne coming up through the installation’s foundations. While they babbled and ran towards the towering scaffold, Lennox and her rebels hauled themselves up through the structure. Heavy servitors and cyborg corruptions shrieked as they were blasted aside. Chainblades opened up the traitor constructs in a fountain of blood and oil before sending them flailing off the scaffold’s edge.

The rapid advance was not met without resistance. About them the very metal of the Titan’s outer hull and the surrounding scaffolding warped with daemonic presence. Infernal eyes opened in the walls. Hatches opened explosively to vomit acidic ichor or shoot grasping tentacles at the rebels. Deck openings became fang-lined mouths that cut insurgents in half. The fighting got close and tangled on a platform crowded with strapped-down stores and cargo nets. They were rushed by servitors with black filth bubbling from their mouth-grilles and a fell light behind their eyes. Lennox ordered her expendable ferals with their limb-fused weaponry into the fray, supported by engineered hulks who tore the traitor servitors limb from corrupted limb.

Higher up, the rebels became caught in a furious exchange of fire as a twisted member of the Titan crew took charge on the scaffold deck, joined by sentries running up the mobile gantries. The stairwell turned into a horrific kill-zone. Lennox didn’t have time or bodies to spare in pushing on through and so cut up through the mesh flooring with her chain-blade. Sending a small group up through the hole with Galahax Zarco, she watched the enginseer swing his power axe about him. With heavy footfalls he took apart possessed servitors and buried the crackling weapon in the Titan crewmember with a sickening thud. With the gauntlet broken, Lennox ordered the rebels onwards and upwards.

The compartments about the Titan’s command deck had been locked off by the time the rebels reached it. Engineering constructs gargled corruption at them through the metal.

‘We don’t have time for this,’ Lennox said to Omnek-70 and Zarco. Levelling his arquebus at the doors, Omnek-70 punched round after transuranic round through the bulkhead and into the cavity compartment beyond. As the sound of the tainted constructs died away, the enginseer buried the crackling cog of his axe in one of the round-punctured doors and heaved it aside. Lennox slipped through, her plasma caliver hugged in at her chest.

The compartment stank of corruption and was wreathed in a lead-coloured smoke. There were warped bodies on the floor with gaping holes through their polluted workings where Omnek-70 had shot them through. A tech-adept came at the princeps, wielding a heavy multi-tool like a club. Leaning into the kick of the caliver, she blasted the thing into oblivion, before turning to face another filth-spewing construct, burning it from existence.

‘Open it up,’ Lennox said to Galahax Zarco as they strode through the compartment and climbed up onto the outer shell of the Titan’s head. From there they could see many other Titans in the gloom of the colossal assembly yard. They were all in different stages of completion, some surrounded by warped scaffolding. Lennox looked down at the corrupted hull of the Ajax Abominata beneath her boots. The princeps could feel the suffering of the afflicted machine-spirit within.

‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 called from the scaffold exterior, his optics whirring through different filters. He pointed out across the assembly yard. ‘The Ventorum is powering up.’

Lennox grunted. The Warlord Titan Belladon Ventorum was one of the many God-Machines waiting in the assembly yard precincts for transportation off-world; and for a long time, judging by its relatively uncorrupted appearance. While most of its weaponry was too powerful to use without damaging the precious Ajax Abominata, its mighty gatling blaster was capable of turning the scaffolding upon which they stood into a blur of shredded scrap.

‘Enginseer, work fast,’ she called.

‘As fast as I can,’ Zarco replied. While a simple hatch, even a reinforced one, shouldn’t have been a problem for a priest of Mars, the corrupted metal sickeningly retracted from Zarco’s tools.

As he finally forced the grotesque thing open, Omnek-70 pointed his arquebus down into the musty darkness of the bridge space. There was no crew on the command deck and Lennox didn’t have time for the intricacies of sabotaging such a complex machine. All she knew was that the most sophisticated piece of equipment on a Titan was the manifold interface and mind-impulse technologies that would link the crew to the machine. Zarco stood aside to let Lennox get past him to the hatch.

‘Pass them along,’ the princeps ordered, as her rebel followers formed a line.

One by one they passed along the demolition packs they had carried with them. Zarco primed the timers before handing the devices over to Lennox, who dropped them down through the hatch.

‘Go!’ she called, moving the Omnissian Faithful off the Titan’s afflicted hull and back into the scaffold complex.

A mobile gantry completed its ponderous swing into position, connecting with the scaffolding, and Lennox’s constructs began exchanging heavy fire with enemy forces running the length of the groaning platform. A tech-thrall exploded in gore and workings as the beam of some tainted weapon hit him. Servo-automata were blasted to shreds and gun-servitors received glowing auto-rounds to the head.

‘Get back!’ Lennox ordered, unleashing a storm of plasma up the ladderwell.

She felt the metal of the walls about her retract and tremble with fury and pain as the plasma stream burned up through both opening and flooring to turn the deck above into a light storm. The half-bodies of smouldering constructs thudded down on top of them.

A daemoniac artisan screeched at the rebels. ‘And you, afflicted thing!’ Lennox roared back, slapping another tri-flask into her plasma caliver and blasting a response. She felt the metal hand of Omnek-70 on her shoulder.

It was time to leave.

‘Tactical withdrawal,’ she ordered, prompting a vat-engineered work-hulk carrying a heavy stubber to stream suppressing fire along the length of the mobile gantry, allowing the rebels time to slide back down through the lower decks. Throwing the caliver across her back on its strap, Lennox clasped the edge of a ladder with the inside of her boots and a loose-gloved grip. Sliding down through the corpse-strewn decks of the Ajax Abominata’s rig, she hit the bottom and got out of the way for Omnek-70 and the much larger Zarco.

The ground floor was a storm of thin, dark beams and arc streams tearing through the scaffolding from reinforcements closing in from outside. The assembly yards were huge and it had taken the installation’s sentries some time to converge upon the Mole and the targeted Titan. The gunfire of Dark Mechanicum constructs cut through the jabbering scrapcode and klaxons shrieking across the assembly yard. As rebels stumbled through the lower level, many were cut down by infernal shock troops closing on their transport.

‘Ratchek, reverse drill,’ Lennox called to the moderatii as she hauled herself up to the scratched hull of the Archimedex. Slapping thralls and limping battle-automata in through the Mole’s hatch, Lennox felt the scaffold’s superstructure tremble.

The explosives fired.

The Ajax Abominata’s command deck exploded, blasting the head of the Titan into nothing more than shattered wreckage, raining flaming debris down through the scaffold rig.

‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 said with a cyborg’s lack of emotion and urgency, and pulled Lennox towards the waiting Mole. She nodded. The mighty Belladon Ventorum was also sending quakes through the assembly yards with its every step, the monstrous Titan moving into position. The rebels’ work here was done. The Ajax Abominata would be going nowhere without a command deck.

With Zarco and Omnek-70 in, Lennox stepped inside the transport and heaved the bulkhead shut.

Safe once more below ground, the Archimedex nonetheless rocked with the quaking force of the explosions above as the Belladon Ventorum opened fire upon the scaffolding complex of its sister engine.

Climbing down through the Mole, Lennox felt the rumble fade as they ploughed down through the bedrock to safety. Not even a Warlord’s terrible weaponry could reach them down here.

It was a job well done. She had denied the Warmaster the Ajax Abominata, saving the countless loyalist lives that the monstrous machines would have claimed. She turned and hit the internal vox stud.

‘Ratchek, fire up the noospherics,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Have Invalis Base advised – mission success. Tell them we’re inbound.’

Lennox wiped down the squat barrel of her caliver with an oily rag, listening to the booming churn and scrape of soil passing along the hull of the Archimedex. It had been a couple of hours since they had left the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards.

Ratchek voice crackled over the internal vox. ‘We have a request for assistance.’

‘Who?’ Lennox said, standing.

‘A scavenger party. Units Forty-Four-Torq and Scallion-Six-One.’

Lennox knew Invalis Base routinely sent out teams to gather uncorrupted weaponry and equipment, but it was rare to see them this far out. ‘Where?’

‘The Autonox solar collection fields,’ Ratchek replied. ‘We’re coming up on their comm-signature now.’

‘What’s their problem?’ Lennox muttered. She wasn’t in the habit of exposing their position for scavengers too lazy to haul their finds back to Invalis Base, no matter how dangerous or essential their work was to the Omnissian Faithful.

‘Pinned down,’ the moderatii told her, ‘by troops tagged with idents associated with Kelbor-Hal himself.’

Lennox nodded. While she was loath to interrupt their journey back to Invalis Base, it would be much worse to have affiliated scavenger parties captured and give up its location under binary-torture.

‘Tell them to await extraction,’ the princeps said. ‘Confirm their position, and prepare to surface.’

Ratchek broke ground a little distance off the comm-signature. Leaving the burrowing transport, Lennox emerged into the Martian dusk, with Omnek-70 and Zarco. The three insurgents found themselves in the smashed and smouldering remnants of the Autonox fields. The vast solar array had suffered in the civil war, with many of the revolving panels a shattered mess and the collector stations decimated.

Moving up with her plasma caliver, Lennox froze at the sound of a vehicle in the sky. Crouching behind a demolished solar panel, she reached out for Omnek-70 who passed her a pair of magnoculars. As she peered up through the wreckage and into the sky she could make out a grav-craft, billowing smoke. Its interior glowed with the horrid brilliance of corruption and its loudhailer barked scrapcode-induced madness. The symbol on the side of the hull was that of the Ordo Reductor.

‘It’s Gordicor,’ Lennox said to Omnek-70 and the enginseer. ‘Or his minions.’

Successes like the one secured at Temple-Tarantyne had not gone unnoticed by the Dark Mechanicum. Accordingly, Kelbor-Hal had charged Magos Reductor Diemon Gordicor with locating saboteurs and seditious constructs. The execution squads of the Ordo Reductor were perfectly suited to hunting down and obliterating camps of hiding loyalists.

Their gathered intelligence told the Omnissian Faithful that Gordicor was answerable only to Aulus Scaramanca and the Fabricator General himself – the magos had secured successes of his own, as testified by loyal constructs recruited from the ashes of such outposts and bases. Lately, Gordicor’s troops had appeared with greater regularity in the southern hemisphere and the polar regions, suggesting to the leadership of the Omnissian Faithful that he was now closing in on their position.

As the rebels moved through the wreckage of the fields, they took cover once again at the sound of gunfire. The grav-craft was strafing the ground with the atomising stream of an under-turret mounted eradication beamer. As Lennox got closer, she could hear the distinctive sound of rad-cleansers and see the flash of beam impacts past the shattered remains of a toppled solar collector. There she spotted the huddled shapes of three constructs, hiding from the fighting beyond.

‘Find a position,’ Lennox told Omnek-70. The skitarii silently obeyed, slipping off with his arquebus to find a place from which to offer covering fire. As always, the Ranger had orders not only to kill Dark Mechanicum constructs but also to put a transuranic round through any members of the Omnissian Faithful if a situation become unworkable and capture seemed likely. The resistance the rebels offered on Mars – symbolically and actually – was bigger than any one construct, even Lennox herself. The princeps had told Omnek-70 that she would much rather suffer his marksmanship than be taken alive into the bosom of corruption.

‘What by Holy Mars is going on?’ the princeps hissed as she came up behind 44-Torq and Scallion-Six-One. They were a couple of scavengers with a talent for spotting untainted weaponry and equipment. They had also brought back to Invalis their fair share of recruits and salvaged constructs. They had the sallow skin of forge-worlders, and their overalls were filthy. Their belts were nests of tools for recovering salvage and they carried cargo nets on their backs full of reclaimed parts, equipment and supplies. 44-Torq looked around, startled to find two shapes behind him, but looked down at the sand in relief as he recognised Lennox and the hulking enginseer.

‘Are we glad to see you,’ Scallion-Six-One said.

Lennox ignored him. ‘Who’s he?’ she asked, pointing her caliver at the ragged figure crouched next to him. Dressed in the remains of a ribbed suit and wearing a gas-masked hood, the gaunt figure had numerals printed across his forehead.

‘Lenk Four-of-Twelve,’ said the stranger, offering his hand. Beyond the burns on his suit, he looked fine to Lennox. Certainly not tainted.

‘He’s been with us for a few days,’ Scallion-Six-One said. ‘Indentured forge labourer. We found him while searching through Dynax Maximal. Says he was over at Icaria.’

Lennox had been sent over to the rebel forces holed up in the Icaria-Selenium Basin. All she had found was ash and charred bodies.

‘We’re bringing him in,’ Scallion-Six-One said confidently. ‘Well, we were.’

‘They almost had us.’ 44-Torq nodded over at the gunfire. ‘Thallaxii – the Ordo Reductor. They came out of nowhere.’

Lennox lowered her head as a heavy weapons cyborg unleashed a photon thruster cannon at the grav-craft from the ground. A repulsor engine on the craft exploded, causing it to bank and crash spectacularly into the sands.

‘Who are they fighting?’

‘This, you will not believe,’ 44-Torq told her. ‘They’re killing each other.’

Lennox was incredulous. ‘Infighting in Kelbor-Hal’s ranks?’

It seemed strange to the princeps. The corruption suffered by such constructs had been absolute in her experience. They were slaves to darkness.

‘We were trying to secure a find,’ Scallion-Six-One told her. ‘A real prize. A Kastelan-class battle automata. Pretty beaten up, but in one piece and without a hint of corruption.’

‘What happened?’

‘Gordicor’s shock troops swooped in on a pass,’ 44-Torq said. ‘We ran for our lives and hid, obviously. Except, when the cyborgs deployed, they didn’t seem interested in sweeping the area for us at all. It seems like they were looking for the unit, too.’

‘The Kastelan?’ Lennox said.

‘They took our find,’ Scallion-Six-One said with obvious regret.

44-Torq shrugged. ‘We hid here for a while and, before we know it, they’re firing on one another...’ As his word trailed off, the sound of gunfire faded, and the scavenger fell silent.

The battle was apparently over.

Lennox heard the trudge of footsteps up behind. It was Omnek-70.

‘They’re all dead,’ he told the princeps with confidence. ‘Come and see.’

He led the way through the wreckage of the shattered solar collectors. 44-Torq and Scallion-Six-One scrambled over to their find, where Enginseer Zarco joined them. While Lenk 4-of-12 and Lennox walked slowly through the carnage, Omnek-70 moved from body to heavily armoured body, checking that the Thallaxii were truly dead. Such cyborg warriors were known for their resilience.

The Kastelan lay immobile in the red dust. It looked wholly unremarkable, and Lennox paid it no further mind.

‘Report,’ she said after Omnek-70 had returned from the crash site.

‘Confirmed. All dead. For attacking their own allies, they were thorough.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Lennox muttered.

‘That’s not all,’ Omnek-70 said. ‘These aren’t the only bodies. Look here and here. Skitarii forge-guard out of Vertex Australis.’

‘They’re a long way from their forge,’ the princeps said.

‘While some of the skitarii have been blasted apart,’ the Ranger said, ‘some of the kill shots are galvanic.’

‘You’re saying some of them turned on their own, like the Thallaxii.’

‘Not just that,’ Omnek-70 informed her. ‘This body exhibits the kind of corruption associated with scrapcode infection, as does this... but this one does not. Nor this one. If we had come across this skitarii or that cyborg before they were destroyed, we would probably have tried to recruit them.’

‘Fascinating,’ Lennox said in a tone that suggested anything but. ‘Perhaps Gordicor is becoming more subtle in his methods. Enginseer, what do we have on the Kastelan?’

‘These markings,’ Zarco told her. ‘First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort. The barrel on the shoulder-mounted bolt cannon has burned out and the maxims on its arms are empty. Shielding and automotives are down – probably a drained reactor. Wait…’

‘What?’ Lennox demanded. She and Lenk 4-of-12 were already giving the thing a wide berth. When the enginseer suddenly got up and backed away, the princeps tensed.

‘Is it polluted?’

Zarco didn’t answer at first. He stared down at the hulking robot before moving back in to check its cranial housing.

‘I’m not detecting any evidence of corruption,’ the enginseer told her. With the plating and visor optics removed, he peered inside the workings of the battle-automata’s head. ‘But I’m also not finding any evidence of a bio-plastic cerebra, or doctrina wafers.’

‘No wetware?’ Lennox asked.

‘Or operational hardware.’

‘But looking at the evidence,’ Omnek-70 said, ‘this unit was responsible for the deaths of at least some of the forge-guard – the Thallaxii also.’

‘It might have something to do with this,’ Zarco said, pointing at an object at the centre of the Kastelan’s chest with his axe, seeming not to want to get too close. It was an intricate orb of polyhedral cogs and interlocking gears. The Byzantine arrangement became smaller and more complex the deeper they stared into its disturbing depths.

Lenk 4-of-12 came up behind Lennox, transfixed by the thing. As he peered around her shoulder, the princeps shrugged the menial off with annoyance.

‘What is it?’ Lennox asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Zarco told her honestly.

‘Enough,’ the princeps said. ‘I don’t want to be out here when the next cohort of Dark Mechanicum troops arrive looking for their fallen comrades. We’re leaving.’

‘What about the Kastelan?’ 44-Torq asked. Despite the alien thing embedded in the centre of the battle-automata’s chest, the scavenger was eager to bring back his find.

‘I leave that assessment to the enginseer,’ Lennox said.

Zarco considered. ‘It is a rare and valuable find,’ he decided. ‘Whether we refit the unit or use it for parts, the reclamation is worth the risk.’

‘Fine,’ Lennox said. ‘Then when we get back to Invalis, it can go into quarantine with this miserable specimen.’

As the princeps pushed past Lenk 4-of-12 and marched back towards the Archimedex, the forge labourer looked back and forth between Lennox and the battle-automata.

‘What does she mean, “quarantine”?’

The Mole pushed through the hole in the cave wall and settled on the cradle of its tracked carrier. Exiting the gyroscopic troop section, Lennox marched down a set of stairs slid out by a pair of hunchbacked servitors. The cave was crowded with other tunnelling machines that were the workhorses of the Omnissian Faithful’s holy work: Hellbores, Termites and smaller breaching drills.

‘Process the retrievals,’ the princeps ordered as she departed the Archimedex, leaving Zarco and Omnek-70 in charge. ‘I’m going to see the lexorcist.’

Lennox made her way through Invalis Base. Situated as they were, deep beneath the highlands, the Omnissian Faithful had so far managed to avoid the attention of the Dark Mechanicum. Orbital surveillance stations and Marauder Vigilants criss-crossed the hemisphere with their augurs and pict-feeds. Ordo Reductor extermination squads searched for rebel elements forge by forge. Daemon engines stalked the dunes of Mars, following the sweet scent of un-warped flesh.

None had found Invalis Base. Using burrowing transports like the Archimedex, the rebels of the Omnissian Faithful broke surface leagues away, ensuring that no track, no footprints or heat signatures left a trail back home.

The region had always been a deadzone, avoided by the Mechanicum and Knightly orders alike. Crystal deposits in the mountains gave off a strange radiation that resisted augur scans, turned data-streams to static and drained cells of power. The highlands were scattered with the rusted wrecks of constructs, vehicles and aircraft that had accidentally wandered in, while the canyons swarmed with feral servitors whose populations in such an area had gone unchecked. With the base situated in a small network of caves far below the mountains, the Omnissian Faithful managed to operate beyond the debilitating technological phenomenon, while at the same time benefiting from its natural protection.

Lennox moved through numerous gauntlets and checkpoints, manned by heavily armed gun-servitors and monstrously bastardised servo-automata. The base itself was a ramshackle place of draping power cables, scavenged equipment and facilities creatively crafted from scrap. Genetors worked on vat-bred reinforcements in their improvised labs. Lennox passed liberated tech-thralls who stood at their posts in the rags of their old uniforms. Cybernetically adapted labourers and menials moved crates of ammunition, blessed unguent and supplies to the lower caves. Scavengers delivered weapons and recovered parts to the artisans in the workshops. Repulsor drones drifted about their duties, while enginseers made constant repairs and rough refurbishments to the base. Code scrubbers monitored the local lines, codestreams and noospherics for any hint of corruption. Consoles and runebanks, meanwhile, were manned by exhausted adepts and half-mangled servitors.

As Lennox marched down the grille walkways, she acknowledged the leaders of other rebel groups heading on missions to the surface – former skitarii sub-alphas, secutor priests and Adsecularis thrallmasters, all leading squads of mismatched troops and constructs.

The command centre was a crowded nexus of battered runebanks, cabling and interfaced servitors. The crackle of hololithic displays lit up the gloom, while the air was thick with noospheric chatter and scrubbed vox-streams. Entering the command centre, Lennox found Arquid Cornelicus – the magos catharc in charge of base security. The priest moved between a nexus of runescreens, with nest of datalines and cables reaching down from the ceiling and plugged into the many ports and interfaces that covered his body. Watching over his work was the hag logista, Algerna Zephyreon – a tall but crooked construct in ragged red robes. The depths of the ancient’s hood were lit by optics of ever-changing colour and sequence, while her emaciated form clicked continually with calculus engines like a fine clockwork instrument.

She waited upon the third construct observing the runescreens in the command centre. Trundling forth on a tracked throne was Raman Synk, lexorcist ward engine and leader of the Omnissian Faithful.

Synk had been a covenant agent of the Mechanicum, responsible for the prosecution of techno-heresy for the Prefecture Magisterium, the Malagra and the Lexorcist General of Mars. He had been better prepared than most when the infectious corruption of the scrapcode swept across the Red Planet and the maddened Fabricator General had declared war on all true subjects of the Omnissiah.

But Synk had paid a terrible price in those early days of war and betrayal. Now he was but a broken construct.

He had found purpose, however, in the doom of Mars. In the dark days since, he had established the Omnissian Faithful and launched a campaign of sabotage and destruction upon the Dark Mechanicum, from deep beneath Invalis.

Although he was little more than a red-robed cadaver restricted to a throne, the metal digits of Synk’s skeletal hands were at constant work upon the runekeys of a claiverboard built into his chest. A floating servo-skull called Confabulari 66 with an undercarriage of tools, interface lines and clawed appendages fussed about him, attending to the lexorcist’s needs. Synk’s voice even proceeded from loudhailers mounted on the servo-skull.

‘My lord,’ Lennox said, stepping through the cables of the command centre and kneeling briefly. Confabulari 66 circled the princeps slowly.

‘Princeps,’ the lexorcist said through the servo-skull’s loudhailers. ‘Your mission to Temple-Tarantyne was a success. A mighty God-Machine denied to Kelbor-Hal and his accursed Warmaster.’

‘Yes, lexorcist.’

‘Yet the same scavengers reported that some hours later,’ Raman Synk said, ‘the Belladon Ventorum, the engine that hunted you at Tarantyne, left the assembly yards in company with two other Warlord Titans. They marched across the Argye Planitia, the Autonox solar collector fields and on into the Invalis region. A corrupted siege company of Krios battle tanks and a section of Thallaxii joined them at Malea Corda.’

‘Gordicor?’

‘Undoubtedly,’ the lexorcist agreed.

‘Then we need to mobilise,’ Lennox said. ‘Why haven’t you sounded the general alarm?’

‘Because they stopped at Phasmi Fossae.’

‘Outside the deadzone?’

‘I don’t think the magos reductor can know of our location,’ Raman Synk told her. ‘If he knew where we are, he wouldn’t have sent Titans and siege equipment. He expects to find a rebel fort or camp. His God-Machines won’t help him here – and not in the Invalis deadzone either.’ A rasping chuckle emanated from the loudhailers.

‘But how could the Ordo Reductor even know we are in the area?’ Lennox said.

‘Timings and trajectories don’t lie,’ Logista Zephyreon said. ‘The Titans followed you from Temple-Tarantyne, to Autonox, to here.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Lennox told the hag defiantly. ‘We were well below augur-range. We surfaced only once, to pick up scavengers and salvage.’

‘The magos catharc has a theory,’ Synk said.

‘A theory I am putting to the test,’ Arquid Cornelicus said, moving between runescreens, trailing cerebral cabling. As the main screen sizzled into focus, Lennox saw that it was showing visual-feed captures from the base’s quarantine facility – a large reinforced cell that was used by the magos catharc and his code scrubbers to inspect constructs and materiel for evidence of corruption. In the reinforced quarantine chamber, the princeps could see the towering Kastelan-pattern robot standing upright but lifeless. Dwarfed by the battle-automaton and hugging the rocky wall was Lenk 4-of-12, diagnostic cabling swinging from his ports and up into he ceiling hub. Cornelicus activated the vox receivers.

‘Get me out of here!’ Lenk 4-of-12 howled. ‘Don’t leave me in here with this thing!’

The forge labourer seemed genuinely uncomfortable in the robot’s solemn presence.

‘You think the battle-automaton is corrupted?’ Lennox asked. ‘That it somehow transmitted a trace of our position?’

‘We’ll soon know,’ Arquid Cornelicus said. The princeps looked down at the floor and then at the lexorcist. The magos catharc spoke into his vox-bead. ‘Release the probes.’

Lennox watched the runescreen as mech-spiders dropped down from the quarantine chamber ceiling on thin cables. They crawled about the armoured shell of the battle-automata, fawning over it with their augur-probosces. Several flattened themselves and, trailing their lines, scrabbled between the armoured plates of the robot to inspect its inner workings.

‘Both the scavengers who found it and my enginseer examined the unit, but could find no evidence of pollution.’

‘Yes,’ Logista Zephyreon said, her voice a harsh reproach. ‘A find altogether too good to be true...’

‘The good princeps is not to be blamed for this,’ Raman Synk said, silencing the hag. ‘Diemon Gordicor becomes more desperate and devious by the day. He’s a warped construct answering to equally warped masters. He’s ready to try anything. He knows that rebel groups need a constant supply of weapons and equipment. He simply needs to scatter such tracked items about and wait for our scavengers to bring them back to base. Inevitable really.’

‘Princeps Lennox is right,’ the magos catharc said, processing the data returning from the mech-spider swarm. ‘Neither I nor my code scrubbers are finding indications of corruption. The machine appears clean.’

‘All the more reason for our scavengers to take it, in the field,’ Algerna Zephyreon insisted. ‘This is bait.’

‘What of tracking devices?’ Raman Synk asked. ‘We need to know if this battle-automaton harbours a device that led the Ordo Reductor here – at least up to the edge of the deadzone.’

‘Well, I can tell you that it has no cortex or processor,’ Cornelicus said, ‘and that its reactor core is burnt out. Although, I have some kind of energy signature.’

‘There,’ Lennox said, squinting at the visual feed. ‘In its chest – an augmentation that my enginseer couldn’t identify.’

The polyhedral cogs of the orb were in motion, each gear synchronising impossibly with hundreds of others. It was mesmerising to watch.

‘What is the name of this cursed machine?’ Raman Synk demanded to know.

‘Identica recorded as Impedicus,’ Arquid Cornelicus said. ‘First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve.’

‘By the Omnissiah, no,’ Raman Synk gasped, his projected voice wavering. ‘The Tabula Myriad.’

‘You’ve seen this thing before?’ Lennox said. ‘What is it?’

‘A long time ago,’ the lexorcist said. ‘It is a heretekal thing of monstrous power. An exigency engine – an Abominable Intelligence that I thought I had buried deep in a dungeon-diagnostica.’

‘What does it do?’ the princeps asked.

‘The Tabula Myriad wins. Using the coldest logic and computational power beyond the servants of the Machine-God.’

With that, the battle-automata suddenly crackled with power. The mech-spiders beneath its armoured shell were fried within the machine’s workings and their trailing lines fused to Impedicus’ feeds. The lamps and the runescreens of the command centre momentarily faded, before cycling through screeds of information at impossible speeds.

‘What’s happening?’ Lennox said.

‘It’s in,’ Arquid Cornelicus said, his voice tinged with fear. ‘It’s using the probe lines to draw power from the base reactor.’

‘Shut it down!’ the princeps shouted.

‘I can’t!’ The magos catharc tugged at the crown of cables ported into his skull. ‘It’s reversed the data-stream on the same lines. Instead of inspecting it, the machine is now raiding our runebanks. I have no base control!’

As the magos panicked and tried to rip his cables free, Lennox stepped forward. Drawing her chainblade, she gunned the weapon’s motor and cut through the cables, freeing the magos catharc from the influence of the Abominable Intelligence.

She looked back to the runescreens. Impedicus had stomped forward, trailing cable lines behind it, the Tabula Myriad’s polyhedral cogs spinning in a blur of alien synchronicity.

Lenk 4-of-12 was screaming. The menial, who had been fearful of the battle-automata when it was a lifeless shell, was now throwing himself wildly at the thick armourglass of the quarantine observation window, his data cables swinging wildly. Battering himself bloody and insensible, he shrieked like a madman. Tearing at his body and face, he turned to face Impedicus. The battle-automata drowned the forge labourer in its shadow.

The screaming stopped. Lenk 4-of-12’s face seemed to relax.

Then, horribly, he thrust his fingers into his stomach with such mindless force that he tore a gaping hole his own abdomen. Fishing around in his guts, with dark-eyed lunacy plastered across his features, the menial tore a black, metallic device from his body. It was covered in spines and flickered with an infernal light.

‘Is this what you are looking for?’ Lenk 4-of-12 hissed in a voice that was not his own. The menial’s skin smouldered to darkness, his teeth grew and his facial features warped into a visage of daemonic savagery. The data cables connecting him to the hub began to seethe with malevolent code.

The battle-automata Impedicus stood silently over the possessed forge-worlder.

Logista Zephyreon staggered back. Both Raman Synk and Confabulari 66 simply stared at the horror unfolding in the quarantine chamber. Lennox hit a vox-stub on the runebank.

‘Activate incendiary countermeasures!’ she ordered, but the code scrubbers and the gun-servitors outside the chamber couldn’t hear. The Tabula Myriad was blocking the transmission. She turned to leave the command centre.

‘I’ve got to get down there and destroy them…’

‘Wait,’ Raman Synk said. He was staring at the runescreen so intently that it drew Lennox back to the spectacle.

The daemon fury of Lenk 4-of-12 faltered. Rather than the Kastelan, it had been the menial recruit who had been carrying the tracking device; the device that could have led Gordicor’s Ordo Reductor force to Invalis.

But now, the fused diagnostic lines bucked and flickered as Impedicus sent a cold stream of logic back into the ceiling hub.

Lenk 4-of-12 let out a pained screech so loud that it distorted the audio channels.

In the presence of the Abominable Intelligence, bathed in cold logic and the truths undeniable, the false construct was cleansed of its corruption. Lennox watched the impossible on the runescreen. The daemonic presence was banished from Lenk 4-of-12. The infernal light died in his eyes. Like tumorous growths before the intensity of radiation, the menial’s corrupted flesh withered. Allowing the tracking device to drop to the floor, Lenk 4-of-12 lost consciousness and followed it, the limp data cables tugging loose from his interface ports as he fell.

Lifting an armoured foot, Impedicus stamped down on the tracking device, crushing the filth of its inner workings into the floor.

‘We found Dark Mechanicum skitarii and shock troops in the field,’ Lennox said, turning to the lexorcist. ‘They had been purged of corruption...’

Synk nodded slowly. ‘Disengage the quarantine failsafes.’

‘What are you doing?’ Arquid Cornelicus demanded. ‘This thing must be destroyed.’

‘The enemy of my enemy,’ the lexorcist said. Confabulari 66 looked at Algerna Zephyreon. ‘We are not a threat that concerns the Tabula Myriad?’

‘Correct,’ the crone said, processing her terrible equations.

‘It wants what it has always wanted – dominion over Mars. As far as the Abominable Intelligence is concerned, we are no threat to its ambitions. The Dark Mechanicum, however, is... and it must be neutralised. In fire, or in spirit.’

‘The greater the number of pure constructs fighting the corrupted,’ the logista added, ‘the greater its chances of success.’

‘Lexorcist,’ Lennox said, ‘what do we do?’

‘Nothing,’ Raman Synk said. ‘Open all data lines.’

‘That’s insanity,’ Arquid Cornelicus said, checking over the runebanks. ‘The Abominable Intelligence is infiltrating all of our systems and noospherics with its signal. It already has transmission access to the base’s border beacons. Instead of alerting us to the presence of intruders, the beacons could advertise our presence to the whole of the quadrant!’

‘Let me hear it,’ the lexorcist ordered.

Flicking a stud, the magos catharc reluctantly allowed Impedicus’ searing signal to fill the command centre. It was simultaneously the most beautiful and horrific thing Lennox had ever heard. Code, cold and constantly recalculating. An irresistible, arithmetical force.

A song for the red sands of Mars.

Cornelicus’s nest of runescreens sizzled suddenly to static, then fell blank.

Letter by letter, word by word, a message began to appear across them – like a forgeling learning code for the first time, or a construct struggling to communicate in a different cant.

++ EXIGENT ASSESSMENT ++

ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE

++ EXTERMINATION OF THREAT PRESENTATION ++

ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE

++ PLANETARY ASSIMILATION ++

ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE

++ SOLAR SYSTEM ASSIMILATION ++

ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE

++ GALACTIC ASSIMILATION ++

ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE

++ UNIVERSAL ASSIMILATION ++

ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE/ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE/ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE/ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE/ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE/ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE/ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE/ADAPT/ENHANCE/REPLICATE...

‘We have prayed, and the Omnissiah has delivered,’ Raman Synk said finally. ‘A dire weapon for a dire threat. Fire with which to fight fire.’

‘It is heretekal,’ Arquid Cornelicus pleaded with the lexorcist.

‘Then let us all be damned, but Mars be saved. This is a heretekal weapon for heretical times. Princeps.’

‘Yes, lexorcist.’

‘I need eyes out on the sands,’ Raman Synk said. ‘Go and see what horror the Tabula Myriad visits upon the enemies at our borders.’

Looking between Cornelicus, the lexorcist and the line-draped figure of Impedicus standing in the quarantine chamber, Lennox turned and left the command centre.

Lennox peered down the magnoculars at a scene of devastation. Having Moderatii Ratchek bring the Archimedex up at Phasmi Fossae, the princeps watched as the Belladon Ventorum turned the wrath of its quake cannon upon its two compatriot God-Machines and its mighty gatling blaster against the armoured companies and cybernetic formations at its feet. With the other two Warlord Titans now nothing more than smoke-streaming wrecks of corruption and the Ordo Reductor forces blasted to oblivion, the God-Machine stood silent. Examining it through her magnoculars, Lennox watched the warped crew climb out of the top hatch of the command deck and leap to their deaths. While suffering superficial damage from fire hastily returned by its compatriot Titans, it seemed as though the element of surprise had spared the Belladon Ventorum a mauling.

Casting her gaze across the engine, Lennox could find no sign of spiritual or physical pollution. The ghostly darkness of its void shielding had dissipated. The infernal glow of its command deck was gone.

With Omnek-70 covering them with his arquebus, Lennox led Ratchek and Enginseer Zarco across the mauled sands. Thallaxii and Krios battle tanks alike had been shredded in the rain of destruction. Picking their way through the devastation, they stood before the still form of the Belladon Ventorum.

Lennox flashed her moderatii a smile. The goggled Ratchek nodded.

‘Enginseer, shall we?’

‘Princeps first,’ Zarco said. ‘As protocol dictates.’

It took some time to climb the shell of the mighty Titan, even making use of maintenance ladder rungs and scramble holds. The rebels found the hatch to the command deck still open. There was no need for Zarco to go to work with his tools this time.

The bridge space was cool and still. A preliminary check of the God-Machine’s systems revealed that it had received the Tabula Myriad’s broadcast and that its own comm-vanes were in turn now transmitting on all channels.

As Zarco climbed down into the engineering section, ready to provide a damage report, Lennox and Ratchek interfaced with the mighty machine-spirit of the Belladon Ventorum. They were only two for now, but they would find other experienced crew loyal to their cause in time.

Hesitantly, the moderatii ported into his deck station.

And Kallistra Lennox became one with the God-Machine.

She plummeted through possibility. She was at once sense and shielding. Flesh and iron. Bone and the colossal workings of an iron behemoth. Lennox felt the machine’s pain, rage and power. She became a conduit for its apocalyptic doom. In those moments, in which monstrous possibility flooded her being, Lennox found it hard to understand how she had ever survived being separated from such Titanic annihilation.

The Belladon Ventorum felt strange at first, like wearing a dead man’s boots. Its machine-spirit was all silent hostility and frustrated anger but, like a death world predator tamed, the Titan slowly took to Lennox. She felt it assess her. As she sensed the God-Machine’s destructive capabilities, the machine, in turn, sensed her own. It drew upon her vengeance. It drank deep in the princeps’ cold fury.

Mars felt different through the sensors and augurs of the God-Machine. Lennox was no longer a being of flesh and fragility. She need not fear the corruptions of code nor the petty fury of deranged traitors. She was beyond such concerns. She was an unfolding tempest, looking down upon Mars and the afflicted constructs that ailed the planet with the serenity of a natural disaster. She was the calm before the coming storm.

She opened a noospheric channel.

<Invalis base, this is the Belladon Ventorum,> Lennox said in a flurry of binaric data. <Standing by for targets.>

‘And the Tabula Myriad has provided them,’ Raman Synk’s voice came, crackling over the vox in reply, ‘in order of tactical importance. A four-thousand-two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-step strategy for taking back the Red Planet, executing a model of growing capability.’

Lennox heard the hollow reservation in the lexorcist’s voice. He was as uneasy as the princeps at accepting guidance from an Abominable Intelligence – an outlawed technology that in less desperate times would have earned the lexorcist’s attentions and deserved the obliterating wrath of the princeps’ mighty cannons.

There were evils in the galaxy, to be sure.

But as Lennox stared out across the sands of the Red Planet she came to accept – as Synk had – that the Tabula Myriad, abhorrent though it might be, was the lesser of such evils.

Lennox knew that there would be a heavy price to pay for such an alliance. She pledged vigilance in the face of such technological abomination. She promised herself and the Mars-that-was that a reckoning would come, and atonement be sought. A time when all debts and transgressions were to be paid for in full.

That time was not today. Not while the Dark Mechanicum held the Forge World Principal tight in the claw of corruption.

<Sounds like we have a lot of work ahead of us,> Kallistra Lennox transmitted with a heavy heart, as the Abominable Intelligence transmitted maps, schematics and data relating to their first target.

LEGIO VENDETTICA ARMOURY DEPOT

MARE HADRIACUM EAST

Lennox nodded her approval. The Belladon Ventorum would need ammunition and power for its great weaponry if it were to be the herald of annihilation across the red expanse of Mars.

<Received,> Lennox said, with a smile spreading across her lips – the first in many months. <Belladon Ventorum, inbound.>

About the Author

Rob Sanders is the author of The Serpent Beneath, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology ‘The Primarchs’. His other Black Library credits include the The Beast Arises novels Predator, Prey and Shadow of Ullanor, the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius and Tech-Priest, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken. He has also written the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos along with many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

Horus is coming… but first, Terra must deal with the Warmaster’s Dark Mechanicum allies. A lone warrior – ‘the Carrion’ – is sent to Mars with a simple mission: end all life on the Red Planet…

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