Mechanicum

1.01

Swathed in faded and tattered robes of rust red, the six Mechanicum Protectors stood unmoving before her, as still as the towering statues of the magi that had stared down upon the thousands of scribes within the great Hall of Transcription of the Librarium Technologica. Their iron-shod boots were locked tight into the ship's deck restraints, while she had had to hold onto a metal stanchion just to avoid cracking her head on its fuselage or tumbling around the hold when it had taken off.

The interior of the ship was bare and unadorned, as functional as it was possible to be. No unnecessary decorations or aesthetic elements designed to ease the eye were included in its design, perfectly epitomising the organisation to which it belonged.

Dalia Cythera ran a hand through her cropped blonde hair, feeling the dirt and grease there and longing for one of her weekly rotations in the Windward sump's ablutions block. She had a feeling, however, that her cleanliness was the furthest thing from the minds of the Protectors.

None of them had spoken to her other than to confirm her name when they had removed her from the cell beneath the Librarium in which Magos Ludd had locked her a week earlier. He'd discovered the enhancements she'd made to the inner workings of her cogitator and had hauled her from the work line in a rage, angry hashes of binaric static canting from his vocaliser.

Seven days alone in complete darkness had almost broken her. She remembered squeezing into a tiny ball when the cell door finally opened and she saw the bronze death masks of the Protectors, their gleaming weapon-staves and the unforgiving light of their eyes.

Ludd's blurted protests at the Protectors' intrusion soon ceased when they invited him to scan the biometric security encryptions carried within their staves. She was frightened of the Protectors, but then she guessed she was supposed to be. Their masters in the Mechanicum had designed them that way, with their enhanced bulk, weaponised limbs and glowing green eyes that shone, unblinking, behind bronze, skull-faced masks.

Within moments, she had been hauled from the cell and dragged through the cavernous, echoing scriptoria where she'd spent the last two years of her life, her limbs loose and weak.

Thousands upon thousands of robed scribes, ordinates, curators and form-stampers filled the scriptoria, and as she was carried towards the enormous arch that led to the world beyond, she realised she would be sad to leave the knowledge that passed through it.

She would not miss the people, for she had no friends here and no colleagues. None of the pallid-skinned adepts looked up from the monotony of their work, the sea-green glow of their cogitators and the flickering lumen globes floating in the dusty air leaching their wizened features of life and animation.

Such a state of being was foreign to Dalia and it never failed to amaze her that her fellow scribes were so blind to the honour of what they did.

The recovered knowledge of Terra and the new wonders sent back from across the galaxy by the thousands of remembrancers accompanying the expeditions of the Great Crusade passed through this chamber. Despite the glorious flood of information, carefully logged and filed within the great libraries of Terra, every one of the faceless minions ceaselessly, blindly, ground themselves into old age repeating the same bureaucratic and administrative tasks every waking hour of every day, oblivious or uncaring of the wealth of information to which they were privy.

Without the insight or even the will to question the task they had been given to perform, the scribes shuffled from their hab-stacks through the same kilometres of well-trodden corridors every day and performed their duties without question, thought or awe.

The rustle of paper was what Dalia imagined the ocean to sound like, the clatter of adding machines and the rattle of brass keys on the typesetters like the motion of uncounted pebbles on a beach. Of course, Dalia had never seen the things she imagined, for the seas of Terra had long since boiled away in forgotten wars, but the words she read as she copied text from the reams of paper and armfuls of data-slates carried in daily by muscled servitors had filled her mind with possibilities of worlds and ideas that existed far beyond the confines of Terra's mightiest scriptorium.

Emerging from the musty darkness of the Librarium Technologica, she had been blinded by the brightness of the day, the sky a brilliant white and the sun a hazy orb peeking through scraps of clouds the colour of corrosion.

The air was cold and thin at this altitude. She could just make out the tips of the slate-coloured mountains that crowned the world over the teeming roofs and spires crammed together in this part of the Imperial Palace. She had longed to see the mountains in all their glory, but her escorts marched her through dark streets that sweated steam and oil and voices towards an unknown destination without pause.

That destination turned out to be a landing platform, upon which sat a vapour-wreathed starship, its hull still warm and groaning from the stresses of an atmospheric entry.

She was led into the cavernous hold and deposited on the floor while the Protectors took up their allocated positions and the mag-locks secured them to the deck. With a juddering roar and sudden lurch, the starship lifted off, and Dalia was thrown to her knees by the violence of the ascent. Fear gripped her and she clung to a protruding stanchion as the angle of incline increased sharply.

The thought that she was leaving the planet of her birth struck her forcefully, and she experienced terrible panic at the thought of venturing beyond her known horizons. No sooner had she chided herself for such timidity, than the panic subsided and she felt her stomach cramp as she realised how hungry she was.

The roaring of the starship and the vibrations on its hull grew louder and more violent until she was sure the craft was going to tear itself apart. Eventually, the noise changed in tone and the starship began to level out, powering through the void at unimaginable speeds.

She was travelling on a starship.

With a moment free to think, she now wondered where she was going and why the Mechanicum Protectors had plucked her from the Librarium's cells and for what purpose. Curiously, she felt no fear of this strange voyage, but she attributed that lack to the mystery and interest of it being enough to overshadow any wariness she felt.

Over the next day or so, her escorts - she did not now think of them as captors - resisted her every attempt at communication, save to instruct her to eat and drink, which she did ravenously, despite the food's chemical artificiality.

They did not move from their locked positions at all during the journey, standing as mute guardians and offering her no diversion save in the study of their forms.

Each one was tall and powerfully built, their physiques gene-bulked and augmented with implanted weaponry. Ribbed cables and coloured wires threaded their robes and penetrated their flesh through raw-looking plugs embedded in their skin. She had seen Protectors before, but she had never been so close to one.

They smelled unpleasantly of rotten meat, machine oil and stale sweat.

They were armed with giant pistols with flaring barrels, and tall staves of iron, topped with a bronze and silver cog, from which hung a scrap of parchment that fluttered in the gusting air within the cold compartment.

A set of numbers was written on the parchment, arranged in a four by four grid, and Dalia quickly worked out that each line added up to the same number, no matter which way they were combined - vertically, horizontally or diagonally. Not only that, but each of the quadrants, the four centre squares, the corner squares and many other combinations added up to the same figure.

'Thirty-four,' she said. 'It's always thirty-four.'

The design was familiar to her and Dalia knew she had seen it before. No sooner had she wondered where, than the answer came to her.

'The Melancholia,' said Dalia, nodding at the parchment.

'What did you say?' asked the Protector.

His voice was human, but echoed with a metallic rasp beneath his bronze mask, and Dalia was momentarily taken aback that he'd actually responded to something she said.

'The symbol on your parchment,' she said. 'It's from an engraving. I saw it in a book I transcribed two years ago.'

'Two years ago? And you still remember it?'

'Yes,' nodded Dalia, hesitantly. 'I kind of remember stuff I've read and don't forget it.'

'It is the symbol of our master,' said the Protector.

'It's from an engraving of one of the old master prints,' said Dalia, her eyes taking on a glazed look as she spoke, talking more to herself than the Protector. 'It was so old, but then everything we transcribe in the great hall that's not from the expedition fleets is old. It was a picture of a woman, but she looked frustrated, as if she was annoyed at not being able to invent something ingenious. She had all sorts of equipment around her, weights, an hourglass and a hammer, but she looked sad, as if she just couldn't get the idea to take shape.'

The Protectors glanced at one another as Dalia spoke, each one gripping his stave tightly. Dalia caught the look and her words trailed off.

'What?' she asked.

The Protector disengaged the mag-lock clamps securing him to the deck and stepped towards her. The suddenness of his motion took her by surprise and she stumbled backwards, falling onto her backside as he loomed over her, the green glow of his eyes shining brightly within his tattered hood.

'I begin to see why we were sent to fetch you,' said the Protector.

'You do?' asked Dalia. 'And you were sent for me? Me? Dalia Cythera?'

'Yes, Dalia Cythera. Rho-mu 31 was sent to fetch you from Terra.'

'Rho-mu 31?'

'That is our designation,' said the Protector.

'What, all of you?'

'All of us, each of us. It is all the same.'

'All right, but why were you sent to fetch me?' asked Dalia.

'We were sent to fetch you before you were executed.'

'Executed?' exclaimed Dalia. 'For what?'

'Magos Ludd invoked the Law of the Divine Complexity,' explained Rho-mu 31. 'Individuals so accused attract the attention of our master.'

Dalia thought for a moment, her eyes fluttering beneath their lids as she recalled what that law concerned. 'Let me think, that's the belief that the structure and working of each machine has been set down by the Omnissiah and is therefore divine… and that to alter it is, oh…'

'You see now why we came for you?'

'Not really,' admitted Dalia. 'Anyway, who is your master, and what does he want with me? I'm just a transcriber of remembrance. I'm nobody.'

Rho-mu 31 shook his head, making a fist and placing it over the silver and bronze cog atop his staff.

'You are more than you realise, Dalia Cythera,' he said, 'but that, and more, will become clear to you when you meet our master: High Adept Koriel Zeth, Mistress of the Magma City.'

'The Magma City?' asked Dalia. 'Where is that?'

'At the edge of the Daedalia Planum, on the southern flank of Arsia Mons,' said Rho-mu 31, lifting his stave and touching it to an opaque panel on the vibrating hull of the starship. A flickering light crackled, and the panel began to change, slowly becoming more and more translucent until finally it was virtually transparent.

When this transformation was complete, Dalia gasped at the sight before her, her face bathed in a fiery red glow from the planet below. Its surface was clad in fire and metal, its atmosphere choked with striated clouds of pollution. Teeming with gargantuan sprawls of industry larger than the continents of Old Earth, the world seemed to throb with the heartbeat of monstrous hammers.

Plumes of fire and towering stacks of iron rose from its mountainous southern regions, and networks of gleaming steel spread out like cracks in the ground through which fractured light spilled into the sky.

'Is that…?'

'Mars,' confirmed Rho-mu 31. 'Domain of the Mechanicum.'

Supersonic shells tore through the gaggle of servitors feeding on the dead techno-mats, obliterating one instantly and blowing the limbs from another. Three others staggered back, chunks of flesh blasted from their emaciated frames. They refused to fall, however, their damaged brains unable to comprehend how grievously the guns of Cronus's Knight had wounded them.

'All yours, Maven,' said Cronus, cutting off the stream of shells.

'So glad you left me something to do,' replied Maven.

Maven moved Equitos Bellum in behind the bloody servitors, the energised blade in his war machine's right fist reaching down and slicing through the survivors in one sweep. Old Stator finished off the stragglers with a short, perfectly controlled burst of laser fire, their wasted bodies exploding in puffs of vaporised blood and scrap metal.

Standing five times the height of the feral creatures, the three Knights towered over the battlefield, though Maven knew that to call it such was to vastly overstate the nature of the deaths they had caused.

The Knights were armoured in thick plates of plasteel and ceramite, protected by layered banks of power fields strong enough to weather the impact of a much larger engine's wrath, and armed with weapons that could kill scores at a time. The plates of their armour were a deep, midnight blue, the right shoulder of each one painted with the design of a wheel encircling a lightning bolt.

The same design was repeated on the long, cream-coloured banners hanging between the mechanised legs of all three war machines, the heraldry of the Knights of Taranis.

Maven rode in Equitos Bellum, an honourable mount with a host of battle honours earned in the earliest days of the Great Crusade. It had fought the enemies of the Imperium beneath a dozen different skies, and even marched alongside the Salamanders of Primarch Vulkan. The design of a firedrake carved into the skull-cockpit of the Knight recalled that campaign, and Maven never tired of telling the stories of that glorious ride into battle.

His studious brother-in-arms, Cronus, rode in Pax Mortis, and Old Stator commanded the august majesty of Fortis Metallum. All three war machines had earned their share of glory on the battlefields of the Imperium, marching ahead of the Titan engines, the god-machines.

The Knights of Taranis were feted among the warriors of Mars for their martial achievements, revered for their place in Martian history, and lauded for the wisdom of their commanders.

Even the mighty princeps of the Titan legions were known to seek the wise counsel of the order's masters, for Lords Verticorda and Caturix were known as leaders whose shared command blended the warrior's heart with the diplomat's cool.

'So why, in the name of the Omnissiah are we stuck out in the arse end of nowhere culling feral servitors?' he asked himself, before remembering that the Manifold-link between the Knights was still open.

'We're here because those are our orders, Maven,' said Stator. 'Do you have a problem with that?'

'No, preceptor,' replied Maven, his tone contrite. 'I just meant that it seems like such a waste of our strength. Can't Magos Maximal's Protectors perform their own culls?'

'Not as well as we can,' said Cronus, his answer sounding like it came from a training manual. Maven felt his lip curl in a sneer at his brother's sycophancy.

'Exactly, Cronus,' said Stator. 'We've been given a duty to protect this reactor complex and there is honour in duty, no matter how far beneath us it might seem.'

Maven sensed an opening and said, 'But the Knights of Taranis once marched with the Crusade. We fought alongside heroes of the Imperium, and now all we do is shoot feral servitors that come up out of the pallidus. There's no glory in this work.'

'These days the threats to the Warmaster's campaigns require forces stronger than us,' said Stator, but Maven could sense the bitterness beneath his words. 'The Great Crusade is almost over.'

'And what will be left for us?' demanded Maven, emboldened by Stator's words. 'There must be expeditions that need the skills of our order.'

'The expeditions do not ask for Knights,' said Stator. 'They ask for the god-machines to walk with their armies. Our role is to protect Mars and maintain the traditions of our order, and part of that tradition is honouring our obligations. Is that understood, Maven?'

'Yes, preceptor,' said Maven.

'Now let's finish this sweep and make sure there are no more of them. Maximal needs this facility kept safe, and Lord Caturix swore that we would do so.'

Maven sighed and walked his Knight to where humming power cables jutted from the hard, orange earth and spat sparks where the servitors had dug at them to feed the machine parts of their ravaged bodies. The corpses of the techno-mats and artificers sent to fix the damage lay in pools of blood that were already congealing in the heat that bled from the fusion reactor further back in the gorge.

'Check for more of them out there, Cronus,' ordered Stator. 'They usually hunt in bigger packs than this.'

'Yes, preceptor,' replied Cronus, marching his Knight past the dead servitors and through the gap torn in the barbed, chain-link fence that surrounded the reactor. Cronus guided his machine up the rocky slopes to check the ground behind an outcrop of boulders. To manoeuvre so large a machine as a Knight over such rough terrain was no mean feat, and Maven was forced to admire his brother's skill as a pilot.

Fortis Metallum's upper body swivelled around on its gimbal waist mount to face Maven, and though he couldn't see his preceptor's face through the red visor of the cockpit, he could feel the stern, unflinching gaze through the softly glowing slits.

'Keep an eye on our rear in case any slipped past us,' ordered Stator, his voice once again as grim and inflexible as the posture of his machine. 'I'll hold you responsible if they have.'

'Yes, preceptor,' replied Maven. 'I'm on it.'

It was a Martian truism that if a warrior and machine spent enough time linked together they would begin to take on aspects of the other's character. Fortis Metallum was an old machine, cantankerous, flinty and utterly without mercy.

It was the perfect match for Stator.

Maven had met countless Titan drivers and it was easy to tell which machines they commanded within moments of talking to them.

Warhound drivers were belligerent, wolf-like daredevils, whereas the men who fought from the towering Battle Titans were arrogant and ego-driven warriors, who often appeared to hold those around them in contempt.

Maven knew that such conceit was forgivable, for marching to war so high above the battlefield and unleashing such awesome destructive power would naturally swell a man's ego, but it was also a necessary defence against the engine's character overwhelming that of its commander.

Maven walked his machine backwards in a bravura display of skill, watching as Stator turned away to follow Cronus through the mangled remains of the security fencing.

A Knight was much smaller than a Titan, but the mechanics in its construction and operation were no less incredible. A Titan had a crew to maintain its systems: a servitor to man each weapon system, a steersman to drive it, a tech-priest to minister to its bellicose heart, a moderati to run the crew and a princeps to command it.

A Knight was the perfect meld of flesh and steel, a mighty war machine at the command of a single pilot, a warrior who had the confidence to wield its power and the humility to know that, despite that power, he was not invincible.

Maven strode back towards the reactor complex, spreading his auspex net wide to pick up any of the feral servitors that might have broken away from the main pack, though he suspected he would not find any. Even if he did, what threat did a few servitors represent?

Broken and irreparably damaged servitors or those whose cranial surgery had failed to take were often simply dumped in the pallidus, the name given to the toxic, ashen hinterlands that existed between the Martian forges. The vast majority died, but some survived, though to call their doomed existence life was overstating the reality of it.

Most simply attempted to carry out the task for which they had been created, marching back and forth through the wastelands with their fried brains unable to comprehend that they were no longer in service.

In some cases, the damage to their brains allowed them a fragile degree of autonomy and those unfortunate creatures survived by feasting on the dead. Drawn by warmth and power, many banded together in unthinking packs and infested Mechanicum facilities, attacking workers and draining current to sustain their wretched experience.

Such creatures required culling, which brought Maven's thoughts full circle.

He lifted his head, the motion of the Knight's cranial carapace following exactly. The crags around the reactor were empty and desolate, the red volcanic peaks scoured by dust clouds blown up by the high winds funnelled along the northern fossae.

The heart of the reactor facility sat six hundred metres back from the fencing that surrounded it, a collection of intricate buildings of pipes, cables and crackling antenna towers. A huge, domed structure sat in the middle of the complex, its surface studded with plugs and vents. The air rippled around the building and intense waves of heat and electromagnetism washed from it in tidal surges.

The trench of the Gigas Fossae was dotted with several fusion reactors, but the facility upon the rocky slopes surrounding the northern impact crater of Ulysses Patera was the largest, and had been built by Magos Ipluvien Maximal.

Adept Maximal was one of the most senior magi of Mars, and his fusion reactors supplied power to a great many vassal forges dotted around the Tharsis uplands. Such arrangements were common across the red planet, ancient treaties binding the clans and forges together in reciprocal pacts of protection and supply that allowed such varied groups with conflicting needs to coexist. As well as allied forges. Maximal had exchanged bonds of fealty and supply with a number of warrior orders, including many of the most revered Titan Legios.

'So why aren't they here?' Maven muttered to himself. 'Too busy arguing amongst themselves is why.'

Maven put thoughts of the increasing tensions on Mars from his mind and made his way forwards, swinging the auspex around by twisting his mount's upper body, pulverising boulders as its enormous weight crushed them beneath its stride. He needed to cover every approach to the reactor complex, and threat or not, Stator would haul him over the coals were any feral servitors to get past him.

He felt the rocks break beneath Equitos Bellum's feet, the sensation akin to having his body and senses magnified to the size of the Knight. Mechanicum Protector squads at the edge of the reactor complex saw him and bowed respectfully as his Knight shook the ground with its heavy strides.

Menials and servitors laboured to maintain the giant reactor functions, their movements slow and sluggish in heavily reinforced haz-mat suits. A huge transformer crackled with energy flares, metres-thick cabling and a lattice of conductor towers linking it to the reactor. Blue lightning sparked from the transformer, rippling along the length of ductwork that was visible before the cables delved beneath the regolith and bedrock towards destinations all across the quadrant of Tharsis.

Maven blinked as he felt a tremor through the auspex return, a fleeting impression of something moving on the far side of the reactor. He focused his attention on that part of the cockpit display, enhancing the imagery in an attempt to see what he was receiving.

'Blood of the Machine,' he swore as the auspex connected with something big, something throwing off a spider-like pattern of electromagnetic energy much larger than a servitor. For the briefest second it appeared as though a great many other signals accompanied it.

An instant later and it was gone, blinked out as though it had never existed.

More ghost returns faded in and out, and Maven was suddenly unsure as to whether he'd seen anything at all.

A Knight's auspex was hardwired into the pilot's senses via a spinal plug, and interpreting the incoming data streams was an art form in itself, a blend of intuition and hard fact. In any case, it was difficult to be sure of anything in this region, the flare-offs and radiation bleeds from the reactor playing havoc with the veracity of auspex returns.

Then the spider pattern flashed again and this time he was certain.

Something was out there, and it wasn't squawking on any friendly channel.

'Preceptor, I think I have something,' said the voice.

'Define ''something'', Maven,' came the voice of Preceptor Stator.

'I'm not sure, but it's coming from the opposite side of the reactor complex.'

'More servitors?' asked Cronus.

Maven chewed his bottom lip, willing the sensor return to come again so he could report something more concrete, but the portion of the Manifold dedicated to auspex returns remained steadfastly awash with background radiation.

Still, he was sure that whatever was out there was more than simply feral servitors. 'No,' he said. 'Something bigger.'

The starship banked as its pilot adjusted the angle of attack to allow it to enter the atmosphere safely. The view through the panel that Rho-mu 31 had rendered transparent slid away and Dalia rapped her knuckles against it.

'I'm assuming this isn't glass,' she said. 'What is it?'

'Photomalleable steel,' said Rho-mu 31. 'A burst of current from my stave alters the structure of the molecular bonds within the metal to allow certain forms of light waves to pass through it.'

'I haven't heard of anything like it,' said Dalia, amazed at the potential for such a material.

'Few beyond the Magma City have,' said Rho-mu 31. 'It is a creation of Adept Zeth.'

Dalia nodded and returned her attention to the view through the transparent metal. No sooner had she done so, than she found herself staring in wonder at an array of enormous structures, surely too large to have been created by the artifice of mere humans.

Colossal orbital constructions filled the heavens above Mars, a near contiguous array of gigantic shipyards and construction facilities. Dalia pressed her face to the cold panel, craning her neck to see how far the unbelievable conglomeration stretched. Try as she might, she could see no end to the gleaming docks, one end of the arc of steel rising up beyond sight above the ship she travelled in, the other vanishing around the curve of the red planet.

'The Ring of Iron,' said Rho-mu 31. 'The original exploratory fleets were constructed here and much of the expeditionary fleets were built in these docks.'

'It's huge,' said Dalia, cursing herself for stating something so obvious.

'They are the largest space docks in the galaxy, though the shipwrights of Jupiter will soon lay claim to the largest ship ever constructed when they complete the Furious Abyss.'

Dalia heard wounded pride in Rho-mu 31's remark and smiled at the notion that a servant of the Mechanicum would display envy. She returned her gaze to the sight beyond the starship's hull, seeing firefly sparks dotting the Ring of Iron where new vessels were being constructed by armies of shipwrights.

'What's that?' she asked, pointing towards what appeared to be a nebulous cloud of dust and reflective particles just over the horizon.

'That is the remains of an active construction site,' said Rho-mu 31. 'The latest ships to be built here have but recently departed.'

'Where have they gone?' asked Dalia, eager to learn what far-off place the new vessels were bound for.

'They were commissioned for Battlefleet Solar,' explained Rho-mu 31, 'but the Warmaster issued a new tasking order to have them despatched to take part in the Istvaan campaign.'

Dalia heard the note of disapproval in Rho-mu 31's voice, as though it were the greatest sin imaginable to change procedure and alter previously issued orders.

'Look, there is the fleet they were to join,' said Rho-mu 31, indicating berths high above them, and Dalia's mouth dropped open as the mighty warships of Battlefleet Solar came into view.

Distance rendered the fleet small, but to even recognise them and identify individual vessels from so far told Dalia that they were craft of unimaginable scale. From here they were sleek darts with sloping angular prows like ploughs and long, gothic bodies like great palaces hurled into the heavens and wrought into the forms of starships.

The ships were soon lost to sight as creeping fire slid along the length of the starship, the heat of passing through the atmosphere of Mars rippling along the shielded hull of the vessel. Dalia felt a steadying hand on her shoulder, a heavy, metallic hand that gripped her tightly as the starship continued its descent.

Flames and heat distortion soon obscured the view, but within the space of a few minutes it faded, and Dalia saw the surface of Mars in all its glory.

Vast cities of steel, larger and more magnificent than any of the hives of Terra, reared up from the surface, gargantuan behemoths that vomited fire and smoke into the sky. It was called the red planet, but precious little remained of the surface that could be identified as that hue. Mountains had been clad in metal and light, and cities and districts perched on the peaks and plateaux of the world named for a long forsaken god of war.

Glittering streams of light twisted and snaked through the few areas of cratered wilderness between the unimaginably vast conurbations, transit routes and mag-lev lines, and towering pyramids of glass and steel reared up like the tombs of forgotten kings.

'I've read about Mars, but I never thought to see it,' breathed Dalia. To see so many wondrous things in so short a time was nothing less than overwhelming.

'The Martian priesthood does not encourage visitors,' said Rho-mu 31. 'They believe the soil of Mars to be sacred.'

'Isn't the idea of things being sacred, well… not allowed any more?'

'In a manner of speaking, yes,' agreed Rho-mu 31. 'The Emperor advances the credo that belief in gods is a falsehood, but a condition of the Treaty of Olympus was that he swore not to interfere with our structures and society when Mars and Terra were joined.'

'So the Mechanicum believes in a god?'

'That is a question with no easy answer, Dalia Cythera. I do not believe in faith, but ask no more, for we are coming in to land and you will need to hold on tightly.'

Dalia nodded as the ship banked sharply, and she watched the world below tilt crazily as the pilot brought them around a shining pyramid bathed in light and topped with a great carving of an eye.

'The Temple of All Knowledge,' said Rho-mu 31, anticipating her question.

Dalia felt her stomach lurch as the ship dropped suddenly and a thick curtain of yellow smog obscured the view outside.

They flew through the smog for several hours until, as suddenly as it had appeared, it vanished, and Dalia cried out in terror as she saw that they were heading straight into the glassy black flanks of a towering mountain.

1.02

Once again, Dalia's stomach lurched as the craft's altitude altered rapidly, climbing at a sickeningly steep angle as the black cliff-face drew closer with terrifying rapidity. Sulphurous fumes wreathed the top of the mountain and the craft plunged into them. Dalia closed her eyes, expecting any moment to have her life ended as they smashed into the immovable mass of rock.

At last she opened her eyes when the feared impact didn't come and peered breathlessly through the transparent panel in the side of the craft. A sea of glowing red lava heaved and swelled beneath her, the volcanic heart of the planet bubbling up within the giant mountain.

Her view of the volcano's caldera shimmered and danced in the incredible heat radiating from the lava, and though she was insulated from the unimaginable temperatures, Dalia felt uncomfortably warm just looking at the molten rock.

'Arsia Mons,' said Rho-mu 31. 'A dead volcano brought back to life to serve the Mechanicum.'

'It's incredible,' breathed Dalia, looking over to the far side of the caldera, where a huge, industrial city-structure fashioned from what looked like blackened steel and stone rose from the lava like the broadside of a submerged starship. Enormous gates steamed in the lava, and mighty pistons of gleaming ceramite hissed and groaned as they rose and fell. Billowing clouds of superheated steam roared and vaporised like the breath of a host of great dragons, and Dalia saw that they were gaining height to fly over the bizarre structure.

Closer now, she could truly appreciate its enormous size and complexity, a precise series of sluices, overflow channels and pressure gates to keep the lava in motion and circulating through the system that fed the incredible sight on the far side of the volcano.

Guided down the flanks of the mountain in enormous chasms a hundred metres wide, the lava from the volcano fed a vast artificially constructed lagoon, an inland sea of glowing, hissing, bubbling molten rock.

Built upon this sea was the Magma City, and what a city it was…

Dalia's breath was snatched from her throat as she saw the mighty forge, surely the domain of Rho-mu 31's master, Adept Koriel Zeth.

All across the bubbling, flame-wracked surface of the lava, blackened cylinder towers soared from the magma beside giant structures in the shapes of flat-topped pyramids that belched fire and steam. Twisting roadways, boulevards, open squares, wide platforms and entire industrial complexes sat upon the raging heat of the lava in defiance of the awesome caged power of the planet's molten fire.

A golden route traced a path towards a mighty structure of silver in the centre of the colossal metropolis, but it was quickly lost to sight as the craft descended. Thick retaining walls of dark stone surrounded the lagoon, such that it resembled a lava-filled crater, and a colossal plain of sub-hives, hab-zones, landing fields, runways, control towers and a vast container port filled the horizon behind it, abutting the cliff-like walls of the volcano.

Continents of steel-sided containers sprawled outwards from the Magma City, towering skyscrapers of materiel: weapons, ammunition and supplies manufactured in the factories of Mars for the Warmaster's armies of conquest.

Fleets of enormous vessels filled the skies over the port, rising and descending to the surface of Mars in a veritable procession of steel and retro-fire. Each one was destined for worlds far distant from the Solar system and as valuable to the Great Crusade as any warrior or battleship.

A forest of lifter-cranes swung and groaned over the container port, their heavy, counterbalanced arms moving with leisurely speed in an intricate ballet as an army of servitors, loaders and container skiffs packed the holds of the enormous bulk conveyors with as much as could physically be contained.

Dalia held onto the stanchion as the ship banked, heading towards a landing platform within the city, a glowing cross of light sitting on a boom of metal that jutted out into the lava. The view through the photomalleable steel rippled in the heat, and Dalia found herself becoming nauseous with the disorientation.

Rho-mu 31 placed his stave against the wall, and once more the side of the vessel became opaque. The hull began to vibrate and screech as they descended through the blistering thermals.

'Do they ever have crashes here?' asked Dalia, knowing that such accidents could have no survivors. 'I mean, have any ships gone into the lava?'

'Sometimes,' said Rho-mu 31. 'It is best not to think of it.'

'Too late,' muttered Dalia, as the noises of the ship's engines changed in pitch from a low rumble to a high-pitched shriek, attitude thrusters firing to correct the rip tide air currents. The pilot was clearly having difficulty in lowering their ship to the landing platform, and Dalia closed her eyes, trying not to think of what would happen if they went into the lava.

She tried not to picture the lava searing the meat from her bones, the fumes choking her and the agonising pain of watching her body disintegrate in front of her. Of course she would not live long enough to experience these things, but her mind delighted in tormenting her with these dreadful visions of catastrophe.

Dalia took a deep breath and forced the images from her mind, fighting to keep them from overwhelming her. She felt a thump on the underside of the craft and her eyes flashed open.

'What was that? Has something gone wrong?'

Rho-mu 31 looked at her strangely, and though the bronze mask concealed his features, Dalia could sense his amusement at her panic.

'No,' he said. 'We have simply landed.'

Dalia let out a shuddering sigh of relief, pathetically grateful to be on terra firma once again… though should that more properly be mars firma? Having said that, how solid could the ground be considered when it was somehow supported on an ocean of liquid rock that could burn her to cinders in the blink of an eye?

A hiss of escaping gases drew her attention to the ramp at the rear of the vessel as it began to lower with a squeal of pistons. A wall of hot air rushed to fill the compartment and Dalia gasped at the sudden heat. Sweat immediately prickled on her brow and her mouth dried of saliva in an instant.

'Throne alive, it's hot!' she said.

'Be thankful for the heat exchangers and gas separators,' said Rho-mu 31. 'You would be overcome by the temperature and fumes of this place in moments without them.'

Dalia nodded, following Rho-mu 31 from the interior of the starship. The other members of his squad moved in behind her as she made her way down the ramp, shielding her eyes from the vivid glare of the lava lagoon and the brightness of the rust-coloured sky. After a day or so in the belly of a starship, she realised how starved of the sight of the sky she had been. Even as a scribe in the bowels of the Librarium Technologica, she had been able to see a sliver of sky through the high liturgical windows.

The sky here was low and threatening, the air thick and heavy with particulate matter billowing upwards from flame-wreathed refineries in the far distance. Though she knew the clouds gathering in the distance were not those of weather patterns, but pollution, she could not help but shiver to see them squatting on the horizon like a quiescent threat.

High railings surrounded the landing platform, and tall silver poles topped with buzzing, hissing machinery punctuated the barrier every few metres - the heat exchangers and gas separators Rho-mu 31 had spoken of, she presumed. A swirling cloud of steam surrounded each one, and dripping pipes ran the length of each pole, vanishing into the decking of the platform to dissipate their heat elsewhere.

'It must take vast amounts of energy to disperse such huge quantities of heat,' she said, pointing at the machines on the silver poles. 'What method do you use to filter the harmful gases from the air? Synthetic membranes, adsorption, or cryogenic distillation?'

'You know of such things?' asked Rho-mu 31.

'Well, I've read about them,' explained Dalia. 'A number of the old texts from the ruins in the Merican deserts mentioned them and, as with everything I read…'

'It slotted home in the archive of your memory as a fact to be recovered at a later date.'

'I guess so,' said Dalia, faintly embarrassed by the reverent tone she heard in his voice.

She looked away from him as she saw an ochre-skinned vehicle emerge from the nearest structure, a tall tower of black metal, and make its way along the boom towards them. It moved on a number of thin, stilt-like legs, moving with a quirky, mechanical gait, like a stubby centipede. As it drew nearer, she saw the wide-bodied mass of a servitor fused and hard-wired into the front section where one might otherwise expect a driver to sit.

The vehicle came to a halt beside them, the multitude of legs twisting it around on its central axis and lowering it to the deck plates.

Rho-mu 31 opened a door in the side of the vehicle and indicated that Dalia should climb aboard. She stepped onto the centipede vehicle and took a seat on the metal bench along its side, feeling a thrill travel through her at the thought of making a journey on such an outlandish mode of transport.

Rho-mu 31 joined her, but the remaining Mechanicum Protectors did not board.

'Where are we going?' asked Dalia, as the vehicle rose up onto its legs once again and set off with a scuttling, side-to-side motion towards the dark tower.

'We are going to see Adept Zeth,' said Rho-mu 31. 'She is most anxious to meet you.'

'Me? Why? I don't understand, what does she want with me?'

'Enough questions, Dalia Cythera,' cautioned Rho-mu 31, not unkindly. 'Adept Zeth does nothing without purpose and you are here to serve that purpose. What manner your service will take is for her to decide.'

The walking vehicle drew near the tower of black metal, and as Dalia looked back towards the gathering clouds, a sliver of fear wormed its way past her wonder at all the new and incredible sights.

She had been brought to Mars with a purpose in mind, but what might that purpose be and would she live to regret the journey?

The shadow of the tower swallowed her, and Dalia shivered despite the awful heat.

Maven's first warning was the transformer exploding in a cascade of flames and whipping electrical discharge. A hammering volley of laser fire, like a hundred lightning bolts ripping from the rocks, sawed through the looped coils of metal and liquefied them in an instant. His display dimmed to protect him from blindness, but before the transformer blew, he saw the outline of the aggressor.

Easily as huge as Equitos Bellum, it was spherical and heavily armoured, a pair of monstrous weapon arms at its sides and a myriad of flexible, metallic tentacles crouched over its shoulders like scorpions' tails.

A trio of convex blisters glowed like baleful eyes on its front, a fiery yellow glow burning from them with a hateful, dead light. The white heat of the explosion obscured the unknown attacker, and by the time the glow had diminished and the Knight's auto-senses had recovered, the war machine had vanished.

With a thought, Equitos Bellum was on a war footing, weapon generators firing from idle to active, and the high-energy cells that drove his Knight switching to battle mode. He immediately stepped his Knight to one side, crouching low as he saw scores of figures pouring from the rocks with weapons raised.

His eyes narrowed as he recognised them as Protector squads, servants of the adepts of Mars. Things were really getting out of hand.

'Stator! Cronus! Are you getting this?'

'Affirmative,' barked Stator. 'Engage enemy forces at will— We will be with you directly.'

'Enemy forces?' hissed Maven. 'They're Protectors!'

'And they are attacking a facility we are duty bound to protect. Now fight!'

Maven cursed under his breath and shrugged, the huge bulk of Equitos Bellum attempting to match the gesture as he marched the machine into battle. He leaned forward in his command seat, lifting his arms and twisting his head as he sought out the enemy war machine.

What was it, he wondered? Some new form of battle robot or servitor-manned automaton?

Maven shivered as he remembered the dead light in the machine's sensor blisters, feeling as though it had been looking at him, assessing him and then dismissing him. That thought alone angered him and he could feel the intemperate fury of Equitos Bellum meshing with him in a desire to do harm to the attackers.

The Protectors in grey cloaks were advancing with relentless pace through the reactor complex, gunning down unresisting servitors with quick bursts of laser fire, and engaging Maximal's Protectors as they sought to defend their master's holdings.

Maven unleashed a torrent of las-fire from his right arm and the ground erupted in a storm of metal and earth. The ruin of the enemy corpses geysered upwards, a knot of attackers reduced to puffs of exploding meat and boiled blood.

A flurry of gunfire rippled towards him, and he flinched as he felt a power field flash out of existence. Like a Titan, a Knight had a finite bank of energy shields to protect it, but where a Titan's reactor could replenish its shield strength in time, the Knight's battery could not. Equitos Bellum was effectively immune to most individual weapons, but the Protectors were combining their fire with accuracy of timing that spoke of a communal battle-link.

Another shield winked out of existence and Maven turned his war machine to face the new threat: a cadre of Protectors armed with long-barrelled high-energy weapons. Maven saw silver bands around each Protector's skull, recognising the hard-wired component of a targeting web.

He stepped sideways as a blistering beam of light leapt from each of the Protectors' weapons and achieved confluence where he had been standing not a moment before. He had seconds to act.

Maven's weapons blazed in a hurricane of light, enveloping the Protectors in a firestorm that obliterated them in an instant and left virtually no remains. He pushed onwards, past the flaming wreckage of the transformer as it spat arcs of lightning and secondary explosions detonated within its ruined shape.

Where the hell had the war machine that had done this gone? And where in the name of Taranis were Stator and Cronus?

An explosion mushroomed skyward from deeper within the complex, and Maven turned Equitos Bellum towards it, the heavy, thudding strides of the Knight shaking the ground with the weight of its tread. Another explosion roared and Maven guided his Knight around the curve of the reactor dome to see his foe with its back to him, unleashing solid spears of plasma flame that ripped through the armoured skin of the fusion reactor's dome.

The machine's bulk was enormous, almost as wide as it was tall, and it was equipped with a fearsome array of weapons - some Maven recognised and some that were a mystery to him. Where a Knight's mode of locomotion was its legs, this machine was mounted on a heavy track unit, blood and oil coating it where it had crushed unfortunate servitors beneath its bulk.

Sheets of molten armour cascaded like burnt paper from the flanks of the reactor dome, and Maven saw it wouldn't be long before the shielding around the caged fury of the fusion reactions within would be breached. Screaming sirens and flashing emergency lights warned of impending doom.

Despite the heavy crash of his Knight's footfalls, Maven didn't think his foe knew he was there. Maven siphoned power from non-essential systems as he prepared to open fire.

One of the metallic weapon-tentacles swivelled around on its mounting, and Maven had the sick feeling that it was looking right at him. Instantly, the rest of the weapon arms not already reducing the armour plating on the reactor to vaporised slag whipped around to face him.

Maven opened fire at the same time as the attacking war machine, his lasers impacting on a number of power fields before tearing one of the weapon arms from its mounting. The return fire struck Equitos Bellum full in the chest, collapsing the last power field and ripping through its armour. Agony roared up through the Manifold and Maven screamed, his hands jerking towards his chest as though the wound had been done to his own flesh.

The Knight staggered, and Maven fought to control its motion through the mist of jarring pain that seared through his every nerve-ending. He wrenched his consciousness from the damage done to Equitos Bellum and felt his vision clear as he saw the enemy war machine preparing to fire again.

Maven sidestepped and lowered his shoulder as another rippling beam of light seared towards him, burning through the edge of his shoulder armour. He flinched, but the damage was superficial and he locked in with his weapon arm, unleashing a stream of laser fire at his enemy's back.

'Got you!' he shouted as the impacts marched over the machine.

The shout died in his throat as he saw that his shots had done absolutely no damage.

A rippling sheath of invisible energy surrounded the machine where none had existed a moment before. Only one explanation presented itself.

The machine was void protected.

'Damn it,' he hissed and his hesitation almost killed him as the machine spun around on its axis and took time out from its unravelling of the reactor's armour to fire on him.

Dazzling lasers sleeted past him and Maven desperately walked his Knight back out of the line of fire. Flames boomed to life around him as fuel stores exploded, and he felt the heat wash over his mount. A lucky shot grazed the pilot's compartment and a sharp crack sliced down through his vision.

Maven screamed in pain, his hand reaching up to his eyes where it felt as though a hot needle had been shoved through to the back of his skull. His vision blurred, but he kept moving, backwards and from side to side, to throw off his assailant's aim.

Fresh streams of laser fire seared the air around him, but none touched him, and as the pain of Equitos Bellum's wounding diminished, he dodged the machine's incoming shots, its fire patterns following textbook sweeps.

But Raf Maven was anything but textbook.

He swung his Knight around the corner of the reactor, sweat streaming down his face and a thin trickle of blood dripping from his nose.

'Stator! Cronus!' he yelled. 'Where in Ares's name are you?'

Then the reactor exploded.

The stilt-walking vehicle moved through a city of wonders and miracles.

Everywhere Dalia looked she saw something new and incredible. Once lost in the midst of the towers and forges, she realised she had never seen anything like the domain of Koriel Zeth, its design and scale quite beyond anything she had imagined before. Though the Imperial Palace on Terra was much, much larger, she appreciated that the Emperor's fastness was not so much a piece of architecture, but rather a handcrafted land mass built upon the world's tallest mountains.

Even on the rare moments she had been permitted to venture beyond the confines of the Librarium, she had only ever seen a fragment of the palace's majesty, but this place she had seen in its entirety.

Even then, she suspected that what she had seen from the air wasn't the whole story.

Rho-mu 31 kept his counsel throughout the journey, content to watch the spires and smoke-belching furnaces pass without comment. Nor was this a city without an organic component, for thousands paraded through its razor-straight thoroughfares and shining boulevards.

Hooded menials, grey-skinned servitors and glittering, holo-wreathed calculi mingled on the metal streets of the Magma City. Robed tech-adepts moved like royalty through the crowds, carried on floating palanquins or wheeled chariots of golden metal, or borne aloft on what looked like gilded theatre boxes with slender stilt legs. All of them bore the number grid symbol of Adept Zeth somewhere about their person.

How any of them didn't collide was a mystery to Dalia, though she presumed that each one would have some kind of onboard navigational system, which linked to a central network that monitored speeds, trajectories and potential collisions.

She shook her head free of the thought and forced herself to concentrate on enjoying the journey. Too often she was being distracted when she saw something new and incredible. Her thoughts would seize on this unknown factor, searching her memory for something similar before sending the creative part of her mind into a freewheeling spin as she attempted to account for the technological explanation of this new phenomenon.

They were heading for the centre of the Magma City, that much was obvious, the unmoving, unblinking servitor fused with the vehicle's control mechanisms conveying them unerringly through the heaving mass of bodies.

Their course took them onto the golden boulevard she had seen from the air, its sides lined with statues and thronged with robed acolytes. At the far end, Dalia saw a towering structure of what looked like bright silver or chrome.

As if fashioned from precisely machined blocks of silver steel, the forge was etched with geometric patterns like those of a circuit diagram, though Dalia had no idea what manner of circuit was described in its design. The servitor increased the speed of their vehicle and the enormous building soon grew in stature until Dalia's neck hurt with craning to look up at its blocky enormity.

A portion of the wall at the base of the forge slid apart and sections of the building seemed to retreat within its structure, forming a gleaming ramp that led up to a vast portico halfway up the building's side.

Dalia gripped the handrail as their vehicle began the ascent, looking behind her as the ramp disappeared as soon as they passed. The portico loomed large above them and now she truly appreciated how enormous it was, each column fashioned in the shape of an enormous piston and capped with cog-shaped capitals.

The entire building was designed as if it were a moving machine, and for all Dalia knew, perhaps it was.

At last the vehicle levelled out and the clacking of its many legs ceased as it came to a halt on the portico's wide plinth. The floor was milky white marble with dark veins running through it, and the columns towered above her. The underside of the pediment was decorated with unknown equations and diagrams picked out in glittering mosaics of gold. The sheer visual splendour was overwhelming.

A wall of bronze doors led into the mighty structure. All were open and from them poured a host of robed figures. Each wore its hood drawn forward to cover its head and each wore the number grid of Adept Zeth as a veil. Many carried strange devices in open boxes or upon their backs.

Leading the figures was a tall, slender adept with a lithe, muscular physique and a cloak of golden-red bronze that billowed behind her in the swirls of hot air.

Without introduction, Dalia knew this must be the Mistress of the Magma City: Adept Koriel Zeth.

Her body was sheathed in a flexible skin of bronze armour, her attire more like that of a warrior woman than a master of technology.

Her features were invisible, hidden behind a studded head mask and opaque goggles. Puffs of steam exhaled from a rebreather mask and a skirt of bronze mail hung low over her shapely armoured legs. Though her body armour obscured all traces of Zeth's humanity, there was no doubt as to her sex.

Every curve and every plate of armour had been designed to enhance her natural form, her slender waist, the curve of her thighs and the swell of her breasts. Fully a third of a metre taller than Dalia, Adept Zeth approached, and a delicate mist of atomised perfume came with her.

She leaned down to stare at Dalia, the glossy black orbs of her goggles like those of an insect regarding some interesting morsel that had just wandered into its lair. Zedi's head cocked to one side and a burst of static hissed from the bronze mesh to either side of her rebreather.

Moments passed before Dalia realised that the static had been directed at her, a blurted hash of machine noise intelligible to the binaric fluent.

'I can't understand you,' she said. 'I don't speak lingua-technis.'

Zeth nodded and her head twitched as though a switch had flicked inside it.

'What relationship does the ideal gas law represent?' asked Zeth, her voice rasping and the words sounding as though they had been dredged up from a little used repository of linguistic memory.

Of all the welcomes, this was one Dalia had not anticipated. She closed her eyes, casting her mind back to one of the first books she had transcribed in the Librarium, a textbook recovered from beneath a ruined tech-fortress of the Yndonesic Bloc.

'It describes the relationship between pressure and volume within a closed system,' said Dalia, the words recited by rote from memory. 'For a fixed amount of gas kept at a fixed temperature, the pressure and volume are inversely proportional.'

'Very good. I am Adept Koriel Zeth. And you are Dalia Cythera. Welcome to my forge.'

'Thank you,' said Dalia. 'It's very impressive. Did it take long to build?'

Zeth looked her up and down, the sound of electronic laughter crackling from her voice unit. She nodded. 'It did indeed. Many centuries of work were needed to build this forge, but even now it is not complete.'

'It isn't? It looks complete.'

'From without, perhaps, but within there is much yet to be achieved,' said Zeth, her delivery growing more fluent as she spoke. 'And that is where you come in.'

'How do you even know me?'

'I know a great deal about you,' said Adept Zeth, looking at the space above Dalia's head. 'You are the only daughter of Tethis and Moraia Cythera, both deceased. You were born in medicae block IF-55 of the Ural Collective seventeen years, three months, four days, six hours and fifteen minutes ago. You were trained to read and write at age three, indentured to the Imperial Scriptorium aged six, and trained in the art of transcription aged nine. You were apprenticed to Magos Ludd aged twelve and assigned to the Hall of Transcription aged fifteen. You have six commendations for accuracy, twelve citations for inciting behaviour deemed to be incompatible with working practices and one instance of imprisonment for violating the Laws of Divine Complexity.'

Dalia looked up, half-expecting to see illuminated letters displaying her life story for Adept Zeth. She saw nothing, but it was clear from the tone of Zeth's voice that she was reading these facts from somewhere.

'How do you know all that?' she asked.

Zeth reached down and brushed a metallic fingertip across Dalia's cheek, and she felt a warm glow as the electoo implanted beneath her skin upon her induction to the Hall of Transcription came to life. She reached up and placed a hand on her skin.

'You can read my electoo?'

'Yes, but I can discern much more than simple biographical knowledge,' replied Zeth. 'All data can be read, presented and transferred with a glance. Though invisible to you, I see a liminal skein of data filling the air around you, each ghost of light a fact of your life. I can see everything about you, all the things that make you a person in the eyes of the Imperium.'

'I've never heard of anything like that.'

'I am not surprised,' said Zeth with a trace of pride. 'It is a function of data retrieval and transfer that I have only recently developed, though I have great hopes for its eventual employment throughout the Imperium. But I did not bring you to my forge only to impress you with my technological developments, I brought you here because I believe your understanding of machines and technology runs parallel to mine.'

'What do you mean?'

'The Martian Priesthood is an ancient organisation and is learned in the ways of technology, but our grasp of such things is limited by blind adherence to dogma, tradition and repetition. I believe that our future lies in the understanding of technology, that only by experimentation, invention and research will our progress be assured. This view is not widely held on Mars.'

'Why not? Seems perfectly sensible to me.'

Zeth made the crackling, static laugh again. 'That is why I sought you out, Dalia. You have a skill I believe will prove very valuable to me, but one that others will fear.'

'What skill's that?'

'You understand why machines work,' said Zeth. 'You know the principles by which they function and the science behind their operation. I accessed the schematics of what you did to your cogitator station and followed the methodology you employed upon the circuitry. It was quite brilliant.'

'I didn't really do anything special,' said Dalia modestly. 'I just saw how I could make it work faster and more efficiently. Anyone could have done it if they'd put their mind to it.'

'And that is why you are special,' replied Zeth. 'Few could have made the mental leaps to see the things you saw, and even fewer would dare. To many of the Martian Priesthood, you are a very dangerous individual indeed.'

'Dangerous? How?' asked Dalia, quite taken aback by the notion that she might be thought of as a danger to anyone, let alone the priests of the Mechanicum.

'Mars enjoys a pre-eminent position within the Imperium thanks to our grip on technology,' continued Zeth. 'Many of my fellow adepts fear the consequences of what might happen were that advantage to slip beyond their control.'

'Oh,' said Dalia. 'So what is it you want from me?'

Adept Zeth drew herself up to her full height, the bronze of her armoured skin gleaming red in the reflected glow of the orange skies.

'You will be part of the salvation of Mars,' she said. 'With your help, I will perfect my greatest work… the Akashic Reader.'

1.03

Ascraeus Mons was a volcano, yet the atmosphere within the Chamber of the First was anything but warm. The fortress of Legio Tempestus had been one of the earliest established on Mars in ancient times and as one of the highest volcanoes on the red planet, it was fitting that it housed one of its most ancient and respected Titan orders.

Carved within the basalt rock of the mountain, the demesne of Tempestus was known as a place of courage and wisdom, a place where warriors of honour came to settle their disputes without violence.

Indias Cavalerio watched from the Princeps Gallery as emissaries from many of the great Legios took their seats within the great amphitheatre carved into the cliffs of the enormous caldera of his order's fortress, knowing the smiles and warm greetings being exchanged hid undercurrents of mistrust and widening divisions.

Divisions that were becoming all too common on Mars.

There was Grand Master Maxen Vledig of the Death-bolts conversing with Princeps Senioris Ulriche of the Death Stalkers, their apparent bonhomie masking decades of disputes involving ancient territorial rights along the borders of the Lunae Palus and Arcadia regions. Across the hall, encased in his life-sustaining exo-skeleton and aloof from all others, was Princeps Graine of Legio Destructor. A dozen others had answered the call to attend the Council of Tharsis (as Lord Commander Verticorda had already dubbed it with his usual taste for the grandiose). Only Mortis was yet to appear.

Verticorda stood in the centre of the grand, echoing amphitheatre, leaning on his ebony, thunderbolt-embossed cane, and swathed in the shadow of Deus Tempestus, the First God Machine of Legio Tempestus.

Towering over the assembled warriors, the great steel engine had stood sentinel over the deliberations of Legio Tempestus for half a millennium, its majesty undimmed and its power tangible, though it had not moved so much as a single joint in over two hundred years.

Next to Verticorda was Lord Commander Caturix, the hunched, ancient warrior's brother-in-arms and fellow master of the Knights of Taranis. Where Verticorda was aged and revered for his wisdom, the newly appointed Caturix was beloved for his fiery passion, which complemented his fellow commander's more cautious temperament.

Ever since Verticorda had bent his knee to the Emperor nearly two hundred years ago, the joint commanders of the Knights of Taranis had served as the Princeps Conciliatus between the warrior orders of Mars. It would be their job to ensure that the coming gathering was conducted in a manner befitting the most ancient warrior guilds, that tradition was upheld and honourable discourse permitted.

Cavalerio did not envy them that role, for tensions were running high and this latest insult to an adept of Mars had pushed the mightiest warrior orders of Mars close to open confrontation, a state of affairs that had not transpired on the red sands for uncounted centuries.

Not only that, but warriors from the Knights of Taranis had been involved in this latest combat, so they were hardly likely to be objective. Verticorda could be trusted to keep his anger in check, but Caturix paced the mosaic floor of the chamber like a caged beast.

Skirmishes between orders were far from uncommon; after all, warriors needed outlets for their aggression to develop their skills and foment the proper bellicose attitude needed to command the god-machines.

Lately, these had threatened to boil over into outright warfare.

The sheer affront of the attack on Ipluvien Maximal's fusion reactor on the slopes of Ulysses Patera had sent shock waves through the Martian community (though to call such a competitive, uncooperative, suspicious and insular organisation as the Mechanicum a community seemed perverse to Cavalerio).

He ran a hand over his scalp, the surface hairless and punctured by sealed implant plugs at his nape that allowed him to command the mighty engines of Legio Tempestus. Similar implants were fused to his spine, and haptic receptors grafted to the soles of his feet and along the tactile surfaces of each of his hands allowed him to feel the Titan's steel body as though it were his own flesh.

Cavalerio's frame was tall and wiry, the dress uniform that had once fitted his well-proportioned frame snugly now hanging from his thin body, the result of decades spent vicariously exerting himself through the actions of a Warlord Battle Titan instead of in the gymnasium.

As he looked over at the mighty form of Deus Tempestus, he found himself longing to ascend the elevator to his own venerable war machine, Victorix Magna. The glowering iron face of the ancient war machine stared down at him, the head of a mechanical god of war that lived in his dreams every night.

In those dreams he would be striding across the ashen red plains of Mars on his last march, Deus Tempestus responding to his every command with the familiarity of two warriors who had fought shoulder to shoulder since their earliest days.

Each time he would wake and, finding sleep impossible, walk through the darkened, sparsely populated hangars of the Ascraeus Mons. The hangars were largely empty, since the bulk of the Legio's strength was deployed throughout the Warmaster's expedition forces, pushing the extremities of the Emperor's realm ever outwards and bringing the last worlds of the galaxy under the sway of the Imperium.

His steps would unerringly lead him to the Chamber of the First, where he would watch the sunrise, staring up at the shadowed form of the colossal war machine, its weapons silent and its war banners fluttering in the downdrafts from above.

Cavalerio's brothers fought under the command of Lord Guilliman, and he could think of no better warrior to lead so august a Legio. He and the few Battle Titans now back on Mars were approaching the end of their refit after campaigning in the Epsiloid Binary Cluster against the green skin and would soon rejoin the war to assure humanity's birthright to rule the stars.

He eagerly awaited their redeployment, for life beyond the cockpit of a Titan was made up of long moments of incompleteness, every experience deadened. His physical surroundings were bland and tasteless without first being filtered through the Manifold of his Battle Titan.

The moment of connection with an engine was painful, as though it resented the time spent separated from its commander, and it took time to wrestle the warlike heart of the machine to compliance. But once that union had been achieved… oh, how like a god did it feel to be master of the battlefield and lord of so terrible and mighty a power?

Separation was no less painful; the angry need of the Titan to walk made it disinclined to allow its commander to leave without punishment. Aching bones, thudding headaches and searing dislocation were the hallmarks of a separation, and each time was harder than the last.

For now, it was possible for Cavalerio to retain some semblance of humanity, to walk as a man, but he knew it was only a matter of time before he would require a more permanent enmeshing within an amniotic float-tank of liquid information.

The thought terrified him.

He shook off such fears as he saw a ripple of motion near the floor of the chamber and heard a murmur of agitation pass through the Chamber of the First.

Cavalerio looked down from the gallery, seeing two warriors in long dark cloaks and grinning skull-faced helmets stride into the chamber with purpose and strength.

Legio Mortis had arrived.

'You deny that your order took part in the attack on Adept Maximal's reactor?' demanded Lord Commander Caturix. 'That engines of the Legio Mortis wilfully destroyed an artefact of technology and endangered the lives of warriors from the Knights of Taranis?'

'Of course I do,' snapped Princeps Camulos, his hooded features making no secret of his disdain for the accusation and his accuser. Despite Verticorda's cautious welcome to the assembly, Caturix had wasted no time in setting the tone by marching straight towards the senior princeps of the Legio Mortis and all but calling him out for the damage done to his warriors in the reactor's explosion.

Cavalerio watched the young lord commander, the youngest in the history of the Knights of Taranis, sneer at Princeps Camulos's answer, plainly disbelieving what he was hearing.

He watched as Caturix circled like a shark in the water with the scent of blood, forced to admire his nerve in facing down so senior a princeps.

Men had been rendered down into servitors for less.

Legio Mortis's disdain for the Knight orders was well known, as was their reluctance to share power in the Tharsis region from their fortress within Pavonis Mons. With the destruction of Adept Maximal's forge, it would be difficult for many of the local warrior orders to remain viable - leaving Mortis the undisputed masters of Tharsis, one of the most abundant and productive regions of Mars.

All of which was enough for the finger of suspicion to point squarely at Legio Mortis, but not enough to hang them. Mortis and Tempestus had long been rivals for dominance of Tharsis, but was that enough to condemn Camulos and openly damn his Legio with this new atrocity?

Camulos was a towering bear of a man, more suited at first glance to be the chieftain of a tribe of bloodthirsty barbarian warriors, but his sheer self-belief and aggressive nature made him a natural Titan commander, easily able to bend the will of a war machine to his own. His armour was black and glistening as though lacquered, the death's head emblem upon his broad shoulder guards a gruesome testament to his Legio's famed ruthlessness.

'I did not come here to be barked at,' snarled Camulos. 'Keep your young pup on a tight leash, Verticorda, or I may break him for you.'

Verticorda nodded slowly. 'The question is withdrawn, honourable princeps.'

Caturix whipped his head around to face his fellow lord commander, but a stern glare from Verticorda silenced the angry outburst that Cavalerio saw gathering in his throat.

'This council is not a trial or indeed any kind of inquiry,' continued Verticorda, his voice laden with centuries of authority and redolent with wisdom. 'It is an organised debate whereby the warrior orders of the Tharsis region might gather to discuss the troubles afflicting our world and decide how to meet them without further bloodshed. Adept Maximal has suffered a grievous loss to his holdings, but we are not gathered here to assign blame, but to see how we, as the guardians of Mars, might avoid such things in the future.'

Cavalerio looked over to where the robed form of Ipluvien Maximal stood in the shadow of Deus Tempestus, as though he took comfort in the nearness of so complex and revered a machine. Adept Maximal had joined the proceedings immediately after the arrival of the Legio Mortis, his corpulent machine-frame wreathed in icy puffs of air vented from the layers of thermal barrier fabrics that cooled the spinning data wheels that made up the bulk of his body.

His head was an oblong helmet of gold fitted with a multitude of lenses upon telescopic armatures, and a morass of sheathed coolant cables emerged from beneath his robes like black tentacles, upon which sat hololithic plates streaming with glowing lines of data.

So far, Maximal had said nothing, save to acknowledge the primacy of Verticorda and Caturix in the proceedings, content simply to watch and record events as they unfolded.

'And how do you suggest we do that?' asked Camulos. 'By accusing honourable orders of warriors of acts of piracy? To suggest that we would stoop so low as to attack the holdings of an adept so highly regarded as Adept Maximal is outrageous!'

Cavalerio looked over as Maximal inclined his golden head at Camulos's compliment. The words felt too tacked on to be believable. For all his bluster, the raid on Maximal's reactor bore all the hallmarks of Legio Mortis - swift, brutal and leaving virtually no survivors.

Only the three Knights had survived to speak of the attack, and all of them had suffered severe damage to their machines in the reactor's detonation. Gun camera footage of the confrontation had been lost in the explosion, and the only clue to the identity of the attacker was a brief description from the sole Knight who had seen the machine.

'In any case, what possible reason could Legio Mortis have for undertaking such an act? We are all servants of the Warmaster, are we not?'

Mixed murmurs of assent and disagreement spread around the chamber, and Cavalerio felt his choler rise that so many could blindly agree with so facile a statement. Rivalry or not, such a comment could not go unanswered.

Cavalerio rose from his seat in the Princeps Gallery and said, 'You mean the Emperor's forces, surely?' Heads turned as he rose to his feet and awkwardly descended the steel steps towards the chamber's floor.

Camulos watched him approach, squaring his shoulders as though they were about to brawl. 'The Warmaster is the Emperor's proxy, it is one and the same.'

'No, actually,' replied Cavalerio, taking the floor, 'it's not.'

'The Chamber recognises Princeps Cavalerio, the Stormlord of Legio Tempestus,' said Verticorda, using the war-name his Legio had given him in the early days of his command.

Cavalerio gave a respectful bow to the lord commander and then to Deus Tempestus before turning to Princeps Camulos. The man's wide shoulders and enormous presence dwarfed him.

'Pray tell why it is not the same thing?' demanded Camulos.

'The armies we serve are those of the Emperor, not the Warmaster,' said Cavalerio. 'No matter that Horus Lupercal commands them, every man, woman and machine that fights in this crusade is a servant of the Emperor.'

'You are splitting hairs,' spat Camulos, turning away.

'No,' repeated Cavalerio, 'I am not. I know that your Legio has pledged a great deal of its strength to the 63 rd Expedition and to the Warmaster. I believe that to be dangerous.'

Camulos turned back towards him. 'Dangerous? To swear loyalty to the glorious warrior who commands the military might of the Imperium while the Emperor retreats to the dungeons beneath his palace? To swear loyalty to the hero who will finish the job the Emperor is too busy to finish? That is dangerous?'

'The Warmaster is a sublime warrior,' agreed Cavalerio, 'but it would be a mistake to think of those armies as belonging to him. Our first loyalty must be to the Emperor, and only a blind man could fail to see how this division is affecting Mars.'

'What are you talking about, Cavalerio?' snapped Camulos.

'You know what I am talking about. Nothing is said and nothing is ever recorded, but we all know that lines are being drawn. The divisions between the adepts of Mars grow ever more vocal and bitter. Long buried schisms are stirred and ancient feuds reignited. The attack on Adept Maximal's reactor is just the latest example of violence that's rising to the surface and spilling out onto the red sands. The factions of belief are mobilising and our world is on the verge of tearing itself apart. And for what? A semantic difference in belief? Is such a thing worth the bloodshed it will no doubt unleash?'

'Sometimes war is necessary,' said Camulos. 'Did not the Primarch Alpharius say that war was simply the galaxy's hygiene?'

'Who knows? It is certainly attributed to him, but what weight do his words carry on Mars? Any war fought here will not be for hygiene, but for misguided beliefs and differences in theology. Such things are anathema to the Imperium, and I will not be drawn into war by the beliefs of religious madmen.'

'Madmen?' said Camulos, with exaggerated horror. 'You speak of the senior adepts of Mars? Such words from a respected princeps.'

Cavalerio ignored the barb and addressed his next words to the assembled princeps and warriors of the Titan orders. 'Every day, the Legios and warrior orders receive petitions from forges all over Tharsis, begging our engines to walk. And for what? Differences of opinion in belief? It is madness that will see us all burn in the fires of an unnecessary war, and I for one will not lead my warriors into battle for such things. The Legios have always been the defenders of Mars, and we have always stood above the squabbles of the Mechanicum. We have always done so, and must do so now. We must not allow ourselves to be baited.'

'True sons of Mars know that the fire of the forge burns hottest when it burns away impurities,' retorted Camulos. 'If blood must be shed to preserve the glory of Mars, then so be it. Kelbor-Hal, the Fabricator General of Mars himself, receives emissaries from the Warmaster, and the great forge masters Urtzi Malevolus and Lukas Chrom have already pledged their labours to Horus Lupercal. Who are we to doubt their wisdom?'

'Then this is not about belief,' said Cavalerio. 'It's rebellion you're talking about.'

A gasp of horror swept the chamber at Cavalerio's words. To even speak of such things was unheard of.

Camulos shook his head. 'You are a naive fool, Cavalerio. The things you speak of have been in motion for centuries, ever since the Emperor arrived here and enslaved the Mechanicum to his will.'

'You speak out of turn!' cried Lord Commander Verticorda. 'This is treachery!'

An angry hubbub filled the Chamber of the First, with princeps, moderati, engineers, steersmen and armsmen rising to protest - either at Camulos's words or at Verticorda's accusation.

Following Cavalerio's example, the senior princeps of Legio Mortis turned to the shouting warriors and said, 'We are shackled to the demands of Terra, my friends, but I ask you why that should be? We were promised freedom from interference, but what freedom have we enjoyed? Our every effort is bent to the will of the Emperor, our every forge dedicated to fulfilling his vision. But what of our vision? Was Mars not promised the chance to reclaim its own empire? The forge worlds long ago founded in the depths of the galaxy are still out there awaiting the tread of any Martian son, but how long will it be before the Emperor claims them? I tell you now, brothers, that when those worlds are held by Terra, it will be next to impossible to reclaim them.'

Camulos turned his gaze upon Deus Tempestus and said, 'Princeps Cavalerio is right about one thing though: a storm is approaching where our vaunted neutrality will not stand. You will all need to choose a side. Choose the right one or it will devour even you, Stormlord.'

Dalia stared at the complex lines radiating from the plans before her, the notations in a tightly-wound gothic script that made reading them next to impossible. Numbers, equations and hand-written notes conspired to make the confusing arrangement of circuit diagrams, build arrangements and milling plans almost unintelligible.

'Give it up, Dalia,' said Zouche, with his customary angry tone. 'We've all been over this a hundred times. It doesn't make any sense.'

Dalia shook her head. 'No. It does, it's just a case of following the path.'

'There is no path,' said Mellicin, her voice arch and weary. 'Don't you think I've tried to follow the plans? It looks like Adept Ulterimus didn't think the standard methodology applied to his own work.'

Dalia rested her arms on the wax paper upon which the plans had been printed. These, of course, were not the originals, which had been drawn many thousands of years ago, but copies transcribed by later adepts over the centuries. She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. She knew she ought to be used to the defeatist carping of her fellows, but their daily negativity was beginning to get to her.

She took a calming breath, picturing the oceans of Laeran, as described by the poet Edwimor in his Ocean Cantos, which she'd transcribed nearly a year ago. The image of that far distant planet's world-oceans always calmed her, and she badly needed that calm now, for time was running out.

No sooner had Koriel Zeth welcomed Dalia to her mighty forge than the adept had turned on her heel and marched deep into the sweltering depths, announcing that Dalia was being taken to where she would be tested.

Dalia had never been comfortable with tests, knowing she tended to clam up, and her mind go blank whenever she was asked a difficult question, let alone made to sit any form of exam. She often wondered how she'd managed to pass her transcription assessments.

The gleaming halls of the Magma City were spacious and functional, geometrically precise and machined with a smooth grace. Though there was utter devotion to function in its architecture, form was not overlooked and there was great beauty in the mechanisms of Zeth's forge. Menials and lowly adepts threaded the halls, chambers and cavernous workspaces, every one according Adept Zeth the proper respect as she passed.

Each new chamber brought fresh wonders of engineering and construction: enormous, cogged machines surrounded by crackling arcs of lightning; thudding pistons driving unknown engines and enormous caverns of steel where thousands of techno-mats toiled at bronze work benches on the tiniest mechanisms with delicate silver callipers and needle-nosed instrumentation.

At last they came to a wide chamber lined with rack upon rack of gleaming tools and fabrication devices that she could not even begin to name. A tall plan chest stood at one end of the chamber and four robed individuals stood around a workbench at its centre, each one shaking her hand and nodding as she was introduced to them.

First was Mellicin, a tall, handsome woman of middling years from the Merican continent, with smooth brown skin and a grafted augmetic faceplate over the left side of her face. She had been coolly welcoming, her remaining eye sizing Dalia up and down with the look of a professional assayer.

Next was a swarthy, stunted individual by the name of Zouche, a native of what had once been known as the Yndonesic Bloc. His handshake was curt and his brusque welcome had a hollow ring to it. Dalia was not tall by any means, but even she towered over Zouche. She estimated his height at no more than a metre.

Next to Zouche was a woman named Severine, who had the look of a teacher about her. Her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail and her pale-skinned features looked as though they might crack if her thin lips creased open with even the fraction of a smile.

Last was a smiling youth who went by the name of Caxton, perhaps a year or two older than Dalia, with a boyish face and a tonsured mop of unruly black hair. His features were open, and of all the greetings she had received his felt the most genuine, and she recognised his accent as having its origins somewhere not too distant from her own homelands, possibly the eastern slopes of the Urals.

With introductions made, Adept Zeth had lifted a number of waxy sheets of paper from the plan chest and laid them flat on the workbench in the centre of the room.

'This,' she announced, 'is one of the last great unrealised designs of Adept Ulterimus, developer of the Sigma-Phi Desolator Engine. Data appellations name it as a theta-wave enhancer designed to stimulate long-term potentiation in humans.'

Ignoring their blank looks, Zeth continued. 'It has been transcribed faithfully by the tech-archivists of Ipluvien Maximal from the data fragments recovered from Adept Ulterimus's tomb below the Zephyria Tholus, and you are going to build it. You will have access to workspace, tools, materials and servitors to perform the manual labour. Within seven rotations you will demonstrate a working prototype.'

With that, Adept Zeth had departed with a swirl of her bronze cape, leaving the five of them alone in the workspace.

The first day had been spent in working out what the device was intended to do, no small feat in itself, given that the transcribers had been literal in copying out Ulterimus's spelling mistakes, corrections and the exact shape and texture of his many crossed-out workings. Sketched images and rough diagrams scattered throughout the plans gave some clues to the device's function, but it was a painstaking process just to divine what requirement this unrealised device was intended to fulfil.

A pecking order had quickly established itself within their group, with Zouche and Caxton deferring to Severing who in turn took her lead from Mellicin. Dalia found her place within that hierarchy when she alone was able to decipher the notes and diagrams enough to understand the device's purpose.

'It's a machine for enhancing the communication between neurons in the brain,' said Dalia after a frustrating hour of unravelling a thread of randomly scrawled notes. 'According to these notes, Ulterimus seemed to believe that a process known as long-term potentiation was what lay at the heart of the formation of memory and learning. It seems to be a cellular mechanism of learning, where the body is induced to synthesise new proteins that assist in high-level cognition.'

'How does it do that?' asked Severine, looking up from redrawing the circuit diagrams and synaptic flow maps.

'By the looks of this molecular formula, it achieves its function by enhancing synaptic transmission,' said Dalia, her eyes darting rapidly over the drawings. 'This wave generator vastly improves the ability of two neurons, one presynaptic and the other postsynaptic, to communicate with one another across a synapse.'

Dalia's fingers spiralled over the drawing, her eyes flitting back and forth across the paper and her own notations, oblivious to the looks she was receiving from her fellows as she spoke, the words sounding as though they came from the deepest recesses of her brain.

'Neurotransmitter molecules are received by receptors on the surface of the postsynaptic cell. When it's active, the device improves the postsynaptic cell's sensitivity to neurotransmitters by increasing the activity of existing receptors and vastly increasing the number of receptors on the postsynaptic cell surface.'

'Yes, but what does that actually meant?' asked Caxton.

'Isn't it obvious?' asked Dalia, looking up from the plan.

The silence of her fellows told her it was not. She tapped the plans with her fingertips and said. 'The device is designed to enormously enhance a person's ability to tap into areas of the brain that we almost never use, increasing their ability to learn and store information at a rate way beyond anything human beings have ever been able to achieve before.'

'But it doesn't work,' pointed out Caxton.

'Not yet,' agreed Dalia. 'But I think I know how we can make it work.'

'Do you think she is right?' asked Ipluvien Maximal, watching Dalia explaining the function of Ulterimus's device on a flickering holo-screen. 'Can she get it to work? No one else has succeeded in a thousand years and you think she can do it in seven rotations?'

Koriel Zeth didn't answer her fellow adept for a moment, letting the chilled gusts of air that wafted from his permanently cooled data frame tease the few organic portions of her flesh that still faced the world.

Maximal's words were artificially rendered, but Adept Lundquist had crafted his vox-unit and the sound of his voice was virtually indistinguishable from an organically created one. Such an affectation seemed ridiculous to Zeth, given the artificiality of the rest of Ipluvien Maximal, but every adept had his own particular idiosyncrasies, and she supposed hers might seem no less ridiculous to others.

'I believe she can,' said Zeth. Her voice was still created by human vocal chords, but rendered hollow and metallic by the studded face mask she wore. She wasn't used to employing her flesh-voice, but indulged Maximal's peccadillo without complaint. 'You saw the schema of the device she altered on Terra. How could she have done that without some unconscious connection to the Akasha?'

'Blind luck?' suggested Maximal. 'A million servitors working on a million plans might eventually hit upon something that works by accident.'

'That old truism?' smiled Zeth. 'You know that's impossible.'

'Is it? I've seen a few of my servitors perform tasks that weren't included in their doctrina wafers. Though, admittedly, my servitors do not function as ably as I would prefer.'

'Only because Lukas Chrom outbid you for the services of Adept Ravachol, but that's beside the point,' said Zeth, irritated by Maximal's digression. 'Dalia Cythera made intuitive leaps of logic, and where she found gaps in the technology, she filled them with working substitutes.'

'And you believe that is because the organic architecture of her brain is attuned to the Akasha?'

'Given that I have eliminated various other factors that might account for her innate understanding of technology, it is the only explanation that fits,' replied Zeth. 'Though she does not know it, she unconsciously accesses the wellspring of all knowledge and experience contained within the Akasha, encoded in the substance of the aether.'

'By aether, you mean the warp?'

'Yes.'

'So why not call it that?'

'You know why not,' cautioned Zeth. 'There is danger in such association, and I do not want prying eyes misunderstanding the concept of what we are trying to do here, not before we fully understand the processes by which we can access the Akashic records and learn that which our ancient forebears understood without the need for dogma and superstition.'

'The source of all knowledge,' sighed Maximal, and Zeth smiled beneath her mask. Appealing to Maximal's obsessive hunger for knowledge was a surefire means of quashing any concerns he had regarding their work.

'Indeed,' said Zeth, baiting the hook some more. 'The history of the cosmos and every morsel of information that has ever existed or ever will exist.'

'If she can build this device then we will be able to unlock the full potential of the Great Reader.'

'That is my hope,' agreed Zeth, running a golden hand across the icy surface of Maximal's chill body. She could feel the subtle vibration of the data wheels churning within the mechanisms of his body, as though in anticipation of learning the innermost workings of the universe. 'If she can build Ulterimus's device then we can enhance the empath's mind to the degree where it will be fully receptive to the knowledge impressed upon the aether. Then we will know everything.'

'Yes… the empath,' said Maximal. 'The use of a psyker disturbs me. If Dalia Cythera already has a connection to the aether, why not simply use her as the conduit?'

Zeth shook her head. 'Prolonged exposure to the aether eventually burns the conduit out. There are plenty of psykers to be had, but Dalia is one of a kind. I would not be so careless with such a valuable resource as to squander her.'

Her answer seemed to satisfy Maximal and he said, 'It is great work we do here, but there will be those who seek to stop us if they should learn of it.'

'Then we must ensure that they do not.'

'Of course,' nodded Maximal. 'But already I detect the interest of the Fabricator General and his cronies in the work carried out in your forge. Info-feeds gossip on the air and data packets are like bodies, they do not stay buried forever. You are a brilliant technologist, but you make few allies with your open scorn for Kelbor-Hal. Be careful you do not make too many enemies and attract undue attention. Such things may cost us dearly.'

'You speak of the attack on your reactor?'

'Amongst other things,' replied Maximal, watching the holographic image of Dalia as she organised her fellow workers in their tasks. 'At the Council of Tharsis, Princeps Camulos denied involvement in the attack, and, much as it surprises me, I believe him.'

'Really? From what I gather, Mortis are agitating for open warfare between the factions.'

'True, and the destruction of my prime reactor would be a logical first step in weakening their strongest opponent, Legio Tempestus, for they greatly depended on its output.'

'The Magma City will cover their shortfall.'

'I told Princeps Cavalerio that very thing,' said Maximal, 'but you and I both know that is only a temporary solution. Mortis and Tempestus are rivals of old, and with the reactor gone, the strength of those friendly to our cause grows weaker.'

'So why do you not suspect Legio Mortis involvement?'

Maximal sighed, another affectation since he had no lungs to speak of, and a mist of cold air billowed around him. 'Camulos's bluster was too confident. He knew we couldn't prove anything because there was nothing to prove. He may have helped plan the attack, but I do not believe any engines from Mortis took part.'

'Then who did?'

'I believe Chrom was behind the execution.'

'Chrom? Because you do not like him?'

'I find his manner insufferable, that is true, but there is more to it than that,' said Maximal with a precisely modulated conspiratorial tone of voice. 'There are rumours of the work he is pursuing in his forge, experiments on engines designed with artificial sentience.'

'Rumours? What rumours? I have heard nothing of this,' said Zeth.

'Few have,' said Maximal slyly, 'but few things escape my data miners. It is whispered that Chrom has even built such an engine. Supposedly, it matches the description given by the Knight pilot who saw the machine that attacked my reactor.'

Zeth shook her head. 'If Chrom has built an engine with artificial sentience, he would be a fool to let it be destroyed.'

'Perhaps it wasn't destroyed,' said Maximal. 'If it escaped into the pallidus we could search for a hundred years and not find it.'

Zeth sensed hesitancy in Maximal's manner, as though there were other facts he was aware of, but was unsure about sharing.

'Is there something else?' she asked.

Maximal nodded slowly. 'Perhaps. Each time a rumour of this machine surfaces, the data conduits whisper a name… Kaban.'

Zeth ran the name through her internal memory coils, but found no match for it.

Maximal read her lack of information in the streams of data floating in her infosphere and said, 'Even I can find only the most cryptic reference to Kaban in the vaults. Supposedly, he was an ancient potentate of the Gyptus who built the lost pyramid of Zawyet el'Aryan. Though in the few hieratic records that remain, his name is transliterated as Khaba, which may either imply dynastic problems or simply that the scribe was unable to fully decipher his name from a more ancient record.'

'And the relevance of this?'

'Purely academic,' admitted Maximal, 'but, interestingly, the records hint that Khaba may be the king's Horus name.'

'A Horus name? What is that?' asked Zeth, knowing that Maximal loved to show off the vast expanse of his archives in his knowledge of ancient times.

'The kings of Gyptus often chose names that symbolised their worldly power and spiritual might to act as a kind of mission statement for their rule,' said Maximal, and Zeth could hear the whir of data wheels as he called up more information. 'Usually the king's name was carved upon a representation of his palace with an image of the god Horus perched beside it.'

'The ''god'' Horus?'

'Indeed, the name is an ancient one,' said Maximal. 'A god of the sky, of the sun and, of course, war. The ancient Gyptians so enjoyed their war.'

'And what did this Horus name symbolise?' asked Zeth, intrigued despite herself.

'No one knows for sure, but it seems likely that it was to imply that Khaba was an earthly embodiment of Horus, an enactor of his will if you like.'

'So you are suggesting that this machine, whatever it is, was built for Horus Lupercal.'

'That would be a logical conclusion, especially as Chrom enjoys the favour of the Fabricator General, and we all know whose voice he listens to.'

'I have heard this before, but I cannot believe Kelbor-Hal values the counsel of the Warmaster over the Emperor.'

'No? I hear that Regulus has recently arrived in the solar system with missives from the 63rd Expedition. And his first port of call is Mars, not Terra.'

'That doesn't prove anything,' pointed out Zeth. 'Regulus is an adept of the Mechanicum, there is no reason to suspect any ulterior motive behind his coming to Mars first.'

'Perhaps not,' agreed Maximal, 'but when was the last time an emissary from the fleets reported to Mars before the Sigillite of Terra?'

1.04

If any of the tissue that caused the chemical and neurological reactions associated with awe were still part of what little organics remained of the Fabricator General's brain, he would no doubt have found the view through the polarised glass that topped the peak of his forge awesome.

But Kelbor-Hal - as his human name had once been - was capable of little in the way of emotional response these days save bitter anger and frustration.

Far below him, the vast forge complex of Olympus Mons stretched away beyond sight, the towering manufactorum, refineries, worker-habs, machine shops and assembly hangars covering thousands of square kilometres of Mars's surface.

The vast hive of manufacture was home to billions of faithful tech-priests of the Machine-God, the great and powerful deity that governed every aspect of life on Mars, from the lowliest tertiary reserve unit of the PDF to the mightiest forge master.

Greatest of the structures arrayed before him was the Temple of All Knowledge, a towering pyramid of pink and black marble, crowned with a dome of glittering blue stone and a forest of iron spires that pierced the sky and pumped toxic clouds into the atmosphere.

Vast pilasters framed a yawning gateway at its base, the marble inscribed with millions of mathematical formulae and proofs, many of which had been developed by Kelbor-Hal himself. Mightier, and home to more workers, priests and servitors than the Mondus Gamma complex of Urtzi Malevolus - where untold thousands of suits of battle plate and weapons were produced to supply the Astartes Legions of the Crusade - the Olympus Mons forge was less a building and more of a region.

The Fabricator General knew he should be proud of his accomplishments, for he had uncovered more technology than any before him and had overseen the longest reign of increasing production quotas in the Mechanicum's long history.

But pride, like many other emotional responses, had all but vanished as the organic cogitator once housed in his skull had been gradually replaced with synthetic synapses and efficient conduits for logical thought. The Fabricator General was over eighty per cent augmetic, barely anything that could be called human remaining of his birth-flesh, a fact of which he was supremely glad.

While the fleshy organ remained in his head, he could feel every biological portion decaying with each passing moment, each relentless tick of the clock a moment closer to the grave and the loss of everything he had learned over the centuries.

No, it was better to be free of flesh and the doubts it fostered.

Far below, thousands of workers filed along the stone-flagged roadway of the Via Omnissiah, its surface worn into grooves by the sandalled feet of a billion supplicants. A score of Battle Titans lined the wide road, their majesty and power reminding the inhabitants of his city, though they needed no reminding, of their place in the equation that was the workings of Mars.

Monolithic buildings flanked the roadways - factories, machine temples, tech-shrines and engine-reliquaries - all dedicated to the worship and glorification of the Omnissiah. Vast prayer ships filled the sky above the volcano, gold-skinned zeppelins broadcasting endless streams of binaric machine language from brass megaphones. Bobbing drone-skulls trailing long streams of code on yellowed parchment swarmed behind the zeppelins like shoals of small fish.

The people below would be hoping their prayers would cause the Machine-God to turn his face towards them and grant a boon. To many of those below, the Omnissiah was a tangible being, a golden figure that had last trod the surface of Mars two centuries ago…

The False God who had enslaved the Martian priesthood to his will with his lies.

The Fabricator General turned from the vista spread before him, his own fiefdom, as he heard a chiming blurt of binary from the ebony-skinned automaton – robot was too crude a word for a work of such genius - standing behind him.

Its form was smooth, athletic and featureless, a gift from Lukas Chrom some years ago that sealed the compact between them. Had the automaton worn a suit of skin, its form would have been indistinguishable from that of a human. Such was Chrom's genius with automata that he could craft designs in metal and plastic so perfectly that they would have shamed the Creator of Humanity himself had he existed.

Though its form appeared unarmed, it was equipped with a multitude of digital weapons worked into the lengths of its fingers, and energised blades could spring from its extremities at a moment's notice.

The automaton was warning him of approaching life forms, and the Fabricator General turned his attention to the brass-rimmed shaft in the floor behind him. The pale, rubberised mask of humanity he wore when meeting those who served him slipped over his mechanised face, a face that had been unrecognisable as human for many years.

A wide disc of silver metal, ringed with brass and steel guard rails, rose up through the floor with a pneumatic hiss. Borne upon the disc were four individuals, three swathed in the robes of adepts of the Mechanicum, one in the dark, fur-collared robes of an ambassador.

The circuitry on the back of the mask meshed with the machine parts of Kelbor-Hal's face, the features of his false visage manipulated into the approximation of the human expression of welcome.

he canted with a binary blurt precisely modulated to convey his authority and wealth of knowledge.

The dark-robed figure, Ambassador Melgator, stepped from the transit disc and inclined his head towards the Fabricator General. Melgator was no stranger to this place, his political duties taking him all across Mars - but always bringing him back to report on the machinations and tempers of the Martian adepts.

Save for the ribbed cabling covering the elongated cone of his skull, the man's face was loathsomely organic, his skin waxy and his eyes saturnine, dark and reptilian. Melgator had sacrificed the gift of further augmentation since his role as Mechanicum ambassador often took him to the gilded halls of Terra. The fleshy rulers of the Emperor's realm were stupidly squeamish with those whose communion with the Machine-God rendered them strange and almost alien to their limited perceptions.

Behind Melgator came two of Kelbor-Hal's most trusted followers, adepts who had followed his lead in all things, who had sworn the strength of their forges to him: Adept Lukas Chrom and Adept Urtzi Malevolus.

Chrom was the larger of the two adepts, his wide-shouldered frame swathed in a deep crimson robe that did little to disguise the many mechanised enhancements with which he had been blessed. Ribbed pipes and cables looped around his limbs and linked into a hissing power pack that rose like a set of wings at his back.

His human face had long since been replaced by an iron mask fashioned in the form of a grinning skull. Wires trailed from the jaw and a pulsing red light filled both eye sockets.

Master Adept Urtzi Malevolus favoured a dark bronze for his face mask, and a trio of green augmetic eyes set into the metal illuminated the interior surfaces of his red hood.

The master of Mondus Gamma's red robes were fashioned from vulcanised rubber, thick and hard-wearing, and a monstrously large power pack was affixed to his back, its bulk held aloft by tiny suspensor fields. Remote probe robots darted back and forth from his body, kept in check by the coiled cables that connected them to the senior adept.

Current flowed between their three forges as a sign of good faith, shared freely and without recourse to monitoring. Of course the greater part of that current was directed to the Fabricator General's forge complex, but such was his right and privilege as master of Mars.

The final figure to join the Fabricator General in his sanctum was one who had not set foot on Mars for some time, an adept who had seceded his forge and all its holdings to Kelbor-Hal when he had left to accompany the 63rd Expedition to the furthest corners of the galaxy.

His robes were a deep red and gave no clue to what form lay beneath them, though Kelbor-Hal knew that little remained of his humanity.

His name was Regulus and this favoured son of Mars had returned with news of the Warmaster's campaigns.

'Fabricator General,' said Regulus with a deep bow, making the Icon Mechanicum with clicking metal digits that unfolded from beneath his robes. 'I welcome the flow of current from your forge along my limbs and within the primary locomotive engine of my body. Power whose generation comes not from Mars is bland and without vitality. It serves, but does not nourish. Each time I return to the wellspring of power and knowledge of Mars I realise how much poorer is energy generated beyond our world.'

'You honour my forge, Regulus,' replied Kelbor-Hal, acknowledging the compliment and turning his attention to his vassal adepts. 'Chrom, Malevolus. You are welcome here as always.'

The two adepts said nothing, knowing that Kelbor-Hal could read their acceptance of his dominance by the subtle fluctuations of their electrical fields.

'What news of the Warmaster?' asked Kelbor-Hal.

In the little contact he had with emissaries from Terra, the Fabricator General was often forced to indulge humans in needless oral formalities, protocols and irrelevant discourse until the subject eventually turned to the matter at hand. With adepts of the Mechanicum such trivial matters were deemed irrelevant and quickly dispensed with. This entire conversation would be conducted in the binary fluency of the lingua-technis, a language that left no room for uncertainty or ambiguity of meaning.

'Much has happened since the Emperor took his leave of the expeditionary forces,' said Regulus. 'Alignments shift and new powers emerge from the shadows, offering their aid to those with the strength of vision to heed them. Horus Lupercal is one such individual, and he is now assuredly a friend of the Mechanicum.'

Kelbor-Hal's language centres easily read the implications of Regulus's words and, though his emotions had long since been cut from him like a diseased tumour, old rancour rose to the surface as he recognised sentiments identical to those espoused in the bargain struck with Terra.

'I have heard words like that before,' he said, 'when Verticorda led the Emperor to my forge over two centuries ago and I was forced to bend the knee to him. The ruler of the grubby Terran tribes promised us an equal role in his grand crusade of conquest, but where is that vaunted equality now? We toil to provide his armies with weapons of war, but receive nothing for our efforts but platitudes. Horus Lupercal is a warrior of vision, but what does he offer but more of the same?'

'He offers these,' said Regulus, as a silver-skinned arm rose from behind his shoulders, a delicate bronze calliper clutching a data wafer of silver and gold. Regulus reached up and took the proffered wafer with one of his primary arms before offering it to the Fabricator General.

'On the world of Aurelius, the Warmaster's Legion met and overcame a foe known as the Technocracy. Its armed forces bore a striking similarity to those of the Astartes and it was clear that they had access to functioning STC technology.'

'Standard Template Construction,' breathed Adept Malevolus, unable to keep the hunger from his voice. Kelbor-Hal had long been aware that both Malevolus and Chrom retained some unpleasantly human traits: avarice, ambition and desire to name but a few. Distasteful and unseemly in such senior adepts, but useful when it came to aligning their factions to his own.

'This Technocracy had access to a functioning STC?' pressed Malevolus.

'Not just one,' said Regulus, with more than a hint of theatricality. 'Two.'

'Two?' asked Chrom. 'Such a thing has not been seen in a hundred and nineteen years. What manner of STCs did they possess?'

'One for the construction of a hitherto unknown mark of Astartes battle plate and another for the production of lightweight solar generators capable of supplying the power needs of an Epsilon 5 pattern forge complex. Unfortunately, the actual Construct machines were destroyed by the rulers of the Technocracy before Imperial forces could secure them.'

Kelbor-Hal could see Malevolus and Chrom look hungrily at the STC wafer, an artefact that contained information worth more than both their forges combined, flawless electronic blueprints created from miracles of design and technological evolution: machines that could design and construct anything their operators desired.

Such machines had allowed mankind to colonise vast swathes of the galaxy, before the maelstrom of Old Night had descended and almost wiped humanity from existence. To discover a working Construct Machine was the greatest dream of the Mechanicum, but to have fully detailed plans created by such a machine ran a close second.

Kelbor-Hal could feel their desire to snatch the data wafer from Regulus in the crackling spikes in their radiating electrics.

'Horus Lupercal sends these gifts to Mars together with a solemn promise of an alliance with the Priesthood of Mars. An alliance of equals, not of master and servant.'

Kelbor-Hal accepted the data wafer, surprised to feel a tremulous thrill of excitement at the thought of what he might learn from its contents. It was a thin sliver of metal, fragile and insignificant, yet capable of containing every written work on Terra a hundred times over.

No sooner had his metallic fingers touched the wafer than his haptic receptors read the data in a flow of electrons, and he knew that Regulus spoke the truth. Genocidal wars had been fought for information less valuable than was contained on this wafer. Millions had died in search of technology worth a fraction of its value.

In centuries past, the Mechanicum had waged war on the tribes of Terra, despatching expeditionary forces to humanity's birth world to plunder forgotten vaults of ancient citadels and wrest the buried secrets of the third planet's ancient technology from those who did not even know it was there, let alone how to use it.

The Emperor had built his world on the bones of this long-buried science, and, unwilling to share it, had fought the soldiers of Mars and hurled them back to the red planet before travelling to Mars in the guise of the Omnissiah and a peacemaker, albeit a peacemaker who came at the head of an army of conquest.

The peace that was offered was illusory, a conceit designed to conceal a darker truth.

The Emperor offered peace with one hand while keeping a dagger behind his back with the other. In reality, the Emperor's offer was an ultimatum.

Join with me or I will simply take what I need from you.

Faced with a choice that was no choice at all, Kelbor-Hal had been forced to bargain away the autonomy of Mars and become a vassal planet of Terra.

'These are great gifts indeed,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'Given freely?'

Regulus bowed his head. 'As always, my master, you cut to the heart of matters with the precision of a laser. No, such gifts are not given freely, they come with a price.'

'A price?' spat Chrom, the glare of his eyes flaring in response. 'The Warmaster seeks to exact more from us? When we have already pledged him the strength of our forges!'

'You seek to back out of the bargain with the Warmaster?' demanded Regulus. 'We knew great things would be asked of us, but the measure of us how we react to these challenges. Great reward comes only with great risk.'

Kelbor-Hal nodded, the blank face of his face mask slipping into the bland countenance of a conciliator. 'Affirmarion: Regulus is correct; we have come too far to balk at paying a price for such things. Already we and our allies strike at those without the vision to see that Horus Lupercal is the true master of mankind.'

'The things we have done,' said Adept Malevolus. 'The schemes we have set in motion. We have come too far and committed too much to back away from the fire simply because we fear its heat, Lukas. The destruction of Maximal's reactor, the death of Adept Ravachol… were they for nothing?'

Chastened from two sides, Chrom bowed his head and said, 'Very well, what does the Warmaster ask?'

Regulus said, 'That when it comes to strike, we guarantee to have Mars firmly under our control. The dissident factions must be quashed so that the forces of the Warmaster may launch his bid for supremacy without fear of counterattack. Any factions loyal to Terra must be brought to heel or destroyed before the Warmaster's forces reach the Solar System.'

'He asks much of us, Regulus,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'Why should we not believe we would merely be swapping one autocrat for another?'

'Horus Lupercal pledges to return the Martian Empire to its former glory,' said Regulus, with the practiced ease of a statesman. 'Further, he swears to withdraw any non-Mechanicum forces from the forge worlds.'

Ambassador Melgator stepped forward, his black, mail-fringed cloak rustling on the smooth floor of the observation chamber. The ambassador rarely spoke when any but he and the object of his attention could hear him, and Kelbor-Hal eagerly anticipated his words.

'With respect, Adept Regulus,' said Melgator. 'The Warmaster, blessed be his name, has already asked us for a great deal and we have delivered. Materiel and weapons are priority tasked to expeditions he favours and delayed to those not aligned with him. He now asks more of us, and are these, admittedly valuable, STCs all he promises us in return? What else does he offer as proof of his continued friendship?'

Regulus nodded, and Kelbor-Hal saw that he had anticipated the question, the prepared answer flowing smoothly from his vocabulator.

'A shrewd question, ambassador,' said Regulus. 'Horus Lupercal has given me an answer that I believe will satisfy you.'

'And that is?' asked Malevolus.

Regulus seemed to swell within his robes. 'The Warmaster will lift all restrictions on research into the forbidden technologies. To that end, I bring the protocols that will unlock the Vaults of Moravec.'

A heavy silence descended on the gathered adepts, as the weight of the Warmaster's offer hung in the air like a promise too good to be true.

'The Vaults of Moravec have been sealed for a thousand years,' hissed Chrom. 'The Emperor decreed that they never be opened.'

'And that means what to us?' sneered Malevolus. 'We already plot against the Emperor, what does one more betrayal matter?'

'The Warmaster has the power to open them?' asked Melgator.

'He is the Emperor's proxy,' pointed out Regulus. 'What the Emperor knows, the Warmaster knows. All it will take to unlock the vault is your agreement to the Warmaster's designs.'

'And if we do not agree?' asked Kelbor-Hal, already extrapolating what great treasures and as yet unknown technologies might lie within the ancient vault. Moravec had been one of the most gifted of the ancient tech-adepts of Terra, a man who had fled to Mars to escape persecution at the hands of superstitious barbarian tribes of the radiation wastelands of the Pan-Pacific.

'If you do not agree, I will wipe the means of opening the vault from my memory coils and it will remain sealed forever,' said Regulus. 'But that will not be necessary, will it?'

'No,' agreed Kelbor-Hal, his pallid features twisted in a grimace of a smile. 'It will not.'

'No, at that length the pin can't be that thin,' said Dalia. 'It'll melt at the temperatures we're expecting inside the cowl transformer.'

'But any thicker and it won't fit inside the cowl,' replied Severine, rubbing the heels of her palms against her temples and deliberately laying down the electro-stylus upon the graphics tablet. 'It won't work, Dalia, you can't make it fit and if there's no pin, the cowl won't remain precisely locked in place over the cardinal points of the skull. Face it, this design won't work.'

Dalia shook her head. 'No. Ulterimus knew what he was doing. This is how it has to be.'

'Then why is there no design for the cowl restraint?' demanded Severine. 'There's no design because he knew it wouldn't work. This whole project isn't something he ever intended to build - it was a theoretical exercise.'

'I don't believe that,' persisted Dalia, turning to the wax paper drawings of the device that the long-dead Ulterimus had produced. As she had for the last five rotations, she pored over the plans and diagrams she had painstakingly copied and updated to fill in the blank spots where the design was incomplete. They were so close.

In the centre of the workspace Adept Zeth had furnished them, a gleaming silver device that resembled a highly modified grav-couch was taking shape. Caxton lay underneath, assembling the circuit boards in the back support, while Zouche was machining the drum cylinders that would insulate the electrical conduits once the internal workings of the device were complete.

Mellicin circled the device, which was large enough to bear a fully grown human in a reclined position, her arms folded before her and one finger beating an irregular tattoo against her teeth.

It had taken them a full five rotations to get this far, and with only two to go, they were either on the brink of their greatest triumph or doomed to ignoble failure. Despite the awkward frigidity of their initial meeting, they had worked well as a team, and relations had thawed in the face of each other's skills.

Zouche was an engineer of rare talent, able to machine working parts with great skill and precision in amazingly short times. Caxton had proven to have an intuitive grasp of how machine parts fitted together, which, together with his uncanny knack of appreciating the knock-on effects of even the smallest change in the structure of a circuit, made him the ideal candidate to assemble the device.

Severine was a draughtsman extraordinaire, able to render Dalia's haphazard sketches into working drawings from which parts could be manufactured. Mellicin was skilled in all aspects of engineering and had a wide breadth of knowledge that covered the gaps that existed between the group's specialisations. Not only that, but her organisational abilities were second to none, directing their labours with domineering efficiency once she understood the breathtaking scale of Dalia's vision.

Contrary to her expectations, Dalia found herself warming to Mellicin, recognising the woman's initial frostiness as no more than a need for Dalia to prove herself.

Since Dalia had divined the purpose of the machine Ulterimus had designed, their work had progressed at an exponential rate, but they had run into a problem that threatened to prevent them from completing their project: a means of linking and supporting the cowl that would cover the head of whoever sat in the machine.

It seemed laughably trivial, yet it held the key to the entire device. Too thin and it would melt, breaking the connection to the skull; too thick and it would not fit between the precisely machined, necessarily compact, components and would provide a surface area from which current would undoubtedly flare - thus disrupting the delicate balance of electrical harmonics generated within the subject's brain.

To be thwarted by such a basic, yet fundamental, problem was uniquely frustrating, and Dalia began to understand why the device had never been successfully constructed.

As Severine held her head in her hands, Dalia's eyes wandered over the drawings, letting the lines and curves of the design wash over her, the notations and measurements swimming around like leaves in a storm. Each portion of the design spun around in her head, each part interlinked and each motion subtly affecting the next with its variation.

Dalia felt her hands moving across the wax paper (hearing the scratch of the stylus she wasn't aware she'd picked up) as she doodled without thinking. The portions of the design that didn't exist were grey patches in her mind, as though the solution to the entire problem lay shrouded in a thick fog.

No sooner had that image come to mind than it was as if a stiff breeze sprang up within her, the clouds of fog thinning and golden lines of fire appearing in their depths. Each line linked the spinning parts of the design, drawing them in tighter and tighter, as though a spun web was drawing all the disparate parts together.

Dalia felt her excitement grow, knowing that she was on the verge of something important. She kept her focus loose with conscious effort, knowing that to concentrate too fully on this intuitive assembly would be to lose it. The leaps of logic her subconscious was making were fragile and could tear like fine silk were they to be tugged too insistently.

Her hands continued to scrawl on the wax paper as the golden lines in her imagination drew closer and closer, finally pulling the thousands of elements of the design together, and Dalia held her breath as they slotted home, one by one, into a harmonious, complete whole.

There.

She could picture it now, complete and flawless in its wondrous complexity.

They would need new parts, entirely redesigned schematics and fresh circuit diagrams.

Dalia could see it all, how it would fit together and how it would work.

Twenty-three hours later, Dalia slotted the final piece of the machine home. The mechanism slid into place with a tiny hiss of pneumatics. Almost a full rotation ago, as she shook herself out of her intuitive reverie, she had looked down to see a fully worked out plan of the images that she had seen in her flight of imagination. The drawings were crude, to be sure, but with even a cursory check, she had known they were right.

With a cry of elation, she had rushed over to Severine and swept the current crop of drawings onto the floor. Over Severine's cries of protest, Dalia had called everyone over and begun to outline the scope of what the rough scrawls described.

The team's initial scepticism had turned to cautious optimism and then excitement as they began to grasp the significance of what she was showing them. Each one shouted out what now seemed so obvious to them, as though the solution had been staring them in the face all along.

As the new design began to take shape in the centre of the workspace, Dalia realised that it had been staring them in the face, they just hadn't realised it. Each of them, herself included, had been working within the hidebound traditions laid down in the Principia Mechanicum, the tenets by which all workings of the Machine were governed.

Aside from Dalia, the members of the team were grafted with shimmering electoos on the backs of their hands to indicate that they had passed the basic competencies of the Principia and were thus members of the Cult Mechanicum. Perhaps with this success she too might be fitted with such a marking, though it was through thinking beyond the Principia's prescriptive doctrines that Dalia had seen the solution to their problem.

'It's incredible,' breathed Severine, as though unable to believe what they had done. 'We did it,' said Zouche.

'Dalia did it,' corrected Caxton, putting an arm around Dalia and kissing the top of her head. 'She figured it out when no one else could.'

'We all did it,' said Dalia, embarrassed by the praise. 'All of us. I just saw how it could work. I couldn't have done it without you. All of you.'

As always, it was Mellicin who brought them back down to reality with a jolt. 'Let's not be awarding ourselves the title of adept yet, everyone. We don't know if it works.'

'It'll work,' said Dalia. 'I know it will, I have faith in it.'

'Oh, and faith now replaces empirical testing, does it? Does it provide hard data to prove we succeeded? No.'

Dalia smiled and bowed to Mellicin. 'You're right, of course. We need to test the device and run a hundred diagnostics to make sure of it, but I know they're going to be fine.'

'I'm sure you are right,' allowed Mellicin with a slight smile that surprised everyone, 'but since we have to do them anyway, I suggest we take an hour's break before getting back to work and beginning the tests.'

'That won't be necessary,' said an authoritative voice from behind them.

Dalia jumped at the sound of the voice, turning to see Adept Koriel Zeth standing at the entrance to their workshop, her bronze armour reflecting the subdued lighting in gold highlights on the curves of her limbs.

Dalia followed the lead of her companions in bowing to Adept Zeth as she swept into the workspace, accompanied by two red-robed Protectors who carried tall staves of iron and whose limbs were sheathed in augmetics. Dalia recognised the Protectors as Rho-mu 31 and smiled at the sight of… him… or was it them? She couldn't quite decide.

Zeth circled the newly completed device and ran her metal clad fingers across its smooth, silver finish. 'You are to be commended. This is fine work. It surpasses my expectations in every way.'

Dalia heard reverence and suppressed desire in Zeth's voice, as though the machine's completion was a dream the adept had not dared believe in too hard for fear it might never come true. Dalia looked up, watching as Zeth lifted the schematics that Severine had drawn up in the wake of her revelations in design, comparing them to the wax paper designs of Adept Ulterimus.

Though Dalia could not see her mistress's face behind the studded mask and inky black goggles, she knew there was an expression of puzzlement forming there.

'I know it doesn't match the plans Adept Ulterimus drew,' explained Dalia. 'I'm sorry about that, but we couldn't get it to work any other way.'

Zeth looked up as she spoke, replacing Severine's plans on the graphics table.

'Of course you couldn't,' said Zeth.

'I don't understand.'

Zeth picked up the wax paper copies of Ulterimus's designs and tore them in two, dropping the shorn halves to the floor.

'This device doesn't work. It never has and it never would.'

'But it will, I'm sure of it.'

'It will now, Dalia,' laughed Zeth. 'Ulterimus was a great adept, with many wondrous ideas and concepts. Ideas are the raw material of progress and everything first takes shape in the form of an idea, but an idea by itself is worth nothing. An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything. The adepts who have won renown through having an idea are those who devoted every ounce of their strength and every resource they could muster to putting it into operation. Sadly, the practical implementation of Ulterimus's ideas left something to be desired, and many of his devices were designed with elements that did not exist or were purely theoretical.'

Dalia was confused, feeling as though she were missing some essential point Zeth expected her to grasp. 'Then how did you expect us to build it?'

'Because I knew that your innate understanding of the why of technology would allow you to change what did not work and invent the pieces of the puzzle that needed inventing. You are the very embodiment of what I call ornamental knowledge.'

'Ornamental knowledge?'

Zeth nodded. 'The adepts of Mars arrange their thought processes like neat machines, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extraneous organs or useless parts. I prefer a mind to be a box of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the box and it adjusts beautifully to its new position. I know you do not yet appreciate this, but many of the things you created to make this device work simply did not exist before you designed and built them.'

'You mean we created… something… new?' gasped Mellicin.

'Precisely,' agreed Zeth. 'And that is not something to be taken lightly. This device would never have worked if you had followed the plans I gave you, but you - and I include you all in this - were able to see beyond what the slavish adherents to the Principia Mechanicum could ever have imagined.'

Zeth stood before them, tall and golden and radiant.

'Such a thing is a gift that will allow me to lift the Imperium into a golden age of scientific progress not seen since humanity set forth from its birth-rock.'

1.05

Fabricator Locum. It was a title that carried great honour, but also one that spoke of a substitute, of a man only good enough to take up the position when one more suited was unavailable. Kane struggled against these feelings, knowing that he was as dutiful and diligent a member of the Cult Mechanicum as any, but feeling that he was somehow outside the closed loop of power.

In years past, the duty of assisting the Fabricator General with the running of Mars, the meeting of production quotas and ensuring the correct devotions to the Machine-God were observed at all times had been a rewarding and fulfilling life. Now, he spent less and less time with his master, dealing instead with the representatives of the various Legion expeditions as they continually requested more.

More guns, more ammunition, more robots; more everything.

A conversation with Straken had been the final straw.

Straken was Astartes, a warrior of the Salamanders who represented his Legion's interests on Mars. The Mechanicum held Vulkan's Legion up as an example of how affairs between the two arms of the Imperium should be conducted, their reverence for finely crafted technology making them welcome visitors to Mars.

Such relations had become strained in recent days as Straken yet again delivered his primarch's displeasure to the adepts of the Mechanicum.

'The lack of armaments and materiel reaching my primarch's Legion is becoming critical,' Straken had said, when Kane had found time to grant him an audience within his forge, a mighty foundry buried deep beneath the domed hill of Ceraunius Tholus.

'This situation cannot be allowed to continue,' said Straken, without waiting for Kane to answer. 'We have no reserves of ammunition beyond that which the forge ships of the Mechanicum contingent attached to our expedition fleet produce. Do you have any idea how much ammunition is expended by a Legion on a war footing?'

Kane was all too aware of the staggering rate at which Astartes consumed ammunition, and to think that the Salamanders were eating into the reserves produced by their few forge ships was a damning indictment of the rate of supply.

These demands were not unexpected, but recently Kane had noticed a distinct pattern emerging in their nature and pattern, a pattern he now felt moved to report to the Fabricator General.

Kane moved through the bright halls of the Olympus Mons forge complex, the burnished metal walls lit gold by the fire from the Temple of All Knowledge. Accompanied by a gaggle of servitors and menials, Kane passed through the glittering boulevards of the forge, its majestic immensity a constructed monument to the power of the Mechanicum and of the Fabricator General. Only the Imperial Palace on Terra stood mightier.

The inner sanctum of Kelbor-Hal was housed within a towering spire that jutted from the northernmost tip of the enormous forge, a peak that almost rivalled the Temple of All Knowledge in height.

A host of Skitarii stood to attention at the base of the tower, hulking brutes in gleaming breastplates, cockaded helmets of bronze and fur-lined cloaks. Taller and broader than Kane, these warriors were designed to intimidate, their bearing that of men bred to kill and feel nothing beyond the need for combat. Strength enhancers, metabolic aggression spikes and pain-suppressers were worked into their flesh as augmetics or glanded into their nervous systems, and Kane felt a shiver of nervous anticipation as he approached, reading their spiking adrenal levels in the ambient electrical field.

he canted in a burst of binary, holding his hand out for a biometric scan. It did not matter that the warriors had seen him a thousand times or more, there were no exceptions to the security protocols surrounding the Fabricator General.

The lead Skitarii, a muscular giant carrying a halberd decorated with all manner of bestial talismans, stepped forward and took Kane's hand. The gesture appeared friendly, but was simply protocol and Kane felt the man's dendrites mesh with the haptic circuitry within his hand. A green light flickered behind the warrior's eyes as he processed the information.

'Fabricator Locum Kane,' agreed the warrior, releasing Kane's hand and waving him past.

Kane nodded and stepped into the tower's only entrance, a simple portal that led to an apparently empty chamber sheathed in reflective silver metal with guard rails around its perimeter. As he took his position in the centre of the chamber, the floor rotated and began to rise.

He called up a gauge onto the inner surface of his eyes, reading the progress of his ascent in binaric numbers that flashed quickly past.

As he was conveyed up the length of the spire, Kane regarded his reflection in the rippling silver walls. Kane disliked the ostentation favoured by many senior magi and embraced a simpler aesthetic in his appearance. Some called it an affectation and he allowed that they were probably right.

Of average height, Kane carried his augmetics subtly, woven within his flesh or rendered into forms less obvious than was usual on Mars. He wore simple red robes with the Icon Mechanicum worked into the fabric in gold thread, and unlike many within the Mechanicum, his face was recognisably human.

His hair was cropped close to his skull, his cheekbones finely sculpted, and a hawk-like nose gave him a patrician air he did nothing to discourage. Only the lambent blue glow behind his eyes gave any indication of the many enhancements worked into his skull.

At last the ascent came to an end, and he ceased his vain contemplation of his appearance as the floor rotated ninety degrees until a portal as plain as the one he had recently passed through came into view. Coloured light spilled into the elevator shaft, and he saw the rust-coloured sky now that he was above the perpetual smog of the forge.

Taking a moment to compose himself, Kane stepped into the Fabricator General's upper viewing dome.

As the Fabricator Locum ascended above the noxious clouds of industry, Dalia and her colleagues were about to descend. The thrill of having pleased Adept Zeth was still potent in the air, and despite her fear, Dalia could feel the anticipation of what their mistress was about to show them fizzing between them all.

Caxton held her hand like a young scholam pupil on a field trip, and Severine could not help an irrepressible grin from splitting her features. Zouche was attempting an air of nonchalance, but Dalia could see that even the laconic machinist was eager to see what lay at the end of their journey.

Only Mellicin appeared unmoved, though she had conceded that she was interested in the promise of what Zeth had to show them.

The adept had said little since approving their design for the theta-wave enhancer, instructing them to follow her to her inner forge.

Dalia and the others had stood dumbfounded for many moments, unsure as to whether they had heard Zeth's instructions correctly.

To see the innermost workings of an adept's forge was to be granted access to their most private and personal works, their obsessions and their passions. Access to such places was notoriously difficult, and only those who had earned an adept's utmost favour would ever be allowed to see what lay within.

'What do you think this Akashic reader is?' asked Severine as they wound a twisting course through the gleaming halls of Zeth's forge. 'Didn't you tell me that Zeth wanted your help to build it?'

'That's what she told me when I first met her,' agreed Dalia, watching the sway of Zeth's golden shoulders and the sashay of her mail cloak as she led them. 'But she never told me what it was.'

'What do you think it is?' inquired Caxton with a boyish grin.

Dalia shrugged. 'Whatever it is, it's something that needs the device we made to work. Perhaps it's some new kind of thinking engine?'

That thought had silenced them all.

Their journey eventually led them to a high-ceilinged chamber with a barrel vaulted roof, bereft of ostentation, in the centre of which a silver cylinder, fifty metres wide, rose within the middle vault.

A dozen armed servitors gathered around the cylinder, their grey-skinned bodies fused to track units, and their arms replaced with monstrous weapons surely too large to be borne without suspensors.

Dalia shared anxious looks with the others as the weapons tracked them on their approach to the cylinder. An exchange of rippling binary passed between Zeth and the servitors, and for the briefest second Dalia thought she saw darts of light flit through the air towards the servitors.

'Do not be alarmed, the praetorians will not attack unless I order them to,' said Zeth.

'Is this your inner forge?' asked Mellicin, as the servitors drew back from a slowly opening door in the gleaming walls of the cylinder.

'One of them,' offered Zeth.

'Then why only servitors to protect it? Wouldn't it be better to have guards that can think for themselves?'

'A good question,' answered Zeth, stepping through the door, 'but what I am about to show you is something that benefits from protection by those who cannot gossip.'

Dalia felt the watchful eyes of the servitors upon her, the hairs on the back of her neck rising as she felt their cauterised minds assess her level of threat. She could visualise the simple logic paths of their battle wetware, tiny decision trees that would decide whether the weaponised servitors would ignore her or obliterate her.

In her mind's eye, she began evolving that wetware, building in safeguards, null-loops and protection subsystems to avoid any paralysing logic paradoxes.

Lines of golden fire emerging from a fog…

'Planning on joining us, Dalia?'

She looked up, startled by the sound of Caxton's voice. Zeth, Rho-mu 31, Mellicin, Zouche and Severine had passed through the door, but the youthful Caxton awaited her and she smiled, faintly embarrassed to have fallen into one of her technical reveries once more.

'Of course,' she said. 'I was just thinking.'

'Anything as exciting as the theta-wave enhancer?' asked Caxton, holding out his hand.

She shook her head as she took his hand with a smile. 'No, just ways to improve the wetware of the servitors.'

'Really? You're a regular STC system, Dalia, you know that?'

'Don't tease,' said Dalia, stepping through the door with him and feeling a gust of frigid air wash over her.

The breath caught in her throat as she found herself standing on what appeared to be a funicular elevator carriage attached to the inner wall of the silver cylinder, which Dalia now saw was hollow and plummeted down into the darkness.

Dalia squeezed Caxton's hand as a sudden knot of vertigo settled in her stomach. The carriage rails spiralled downwards, and Dalia closed her eyes in fear as the doors she had just stepped through slid shut behind her.

'You are uncomfortable with this mode of transport?' asked Rho-mu 31.

'I don't like heights,' gasped Dalia. 'I never have.'

'Don't worry,' said Zouche. 'Can't see the bottom, so you can't tell how high we are.'

'That doesn't help,' snapped Dalia.

Zouche shrugged. 'Oh, I thought it might.'

'Well it doesn't, so keep thoughts like that to yourself!'

'Just trying to put your mind at ease,' grumbled Zouche.

Dalia yelped as the funicular car began its spiralling descent with a jolt, gaining speed as Zeth pushed out the throttle. Her breath came in short, hiking gulps, the analytical part of her brain processing that the air was cold, far colder than she might have expected, even allowing for the speed they travelled through the echoing empty space.

She kept her eyes shut as the carriage spiralled deeper and deeper into the bowels of Zeth's forge. The air was chill in her lungs and she opened her eyes to see a cloud of breath misting before her mouth.

Cracked white lines of ice were forming on the metal guard rails of the carriage.

'It's cold,' said Dalia. 'Look, there's frost on the metal.'

'So there is,' said Caxton, releasing her hand and wrapping his arm around her.

'Don't you think that's odd?'

'Odd how?'

'We're descending into the planet's surface or at least below a lagoon of lava, so I'd have thought it would be getting warmer.'

Caxton shrugged, giving her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. 'The wonders of the Mechanicum, I guess.'

Dalia forced a smile as the car continued on its interminable descent, once again screwing her eyes tightly shut.

It seemed they had been travelling for hours, though Dalia knew it could only have been ten minutes at the most. Other than the few words she had exchanged with Caxton, the journey was wordless, yet Dalia had the distinct impression that someone was speaking to her.

She looked over at her fellow travellers. Each was engrossed in the journey, either craning their necks upwards to the spot of light at the top of the cylinder, or leaning over the edges of the railings to penetrate the gloom below.

None, however, were speaking.

Dalia squinted in puzzlement as she stared at Adept Zeth and Rho-mu 31, seeing a ghostly nimbus of light floating above their heads that rippled like a sheet of luminous gauze. Flickering scraps of light darted between Zeth and her Protectors, as though they were communicating in some non-verbal manner.

Was she hearing echoes of that communication?

As though aware of the scrutiny, Adept Zeth turned to face her and Dalia guiltily turned away, closing her eyes and concentrating on the sounds she had heard. The rumbling of the carriage was loud, yet Dalia felt she could hear something beyond the squeal of the metal wheels along the rails.

Something soft, a whisper of far away… a chorus of commingled voices.

'Do you hear that?' she asked.

'Hear what?' asked Caxton.

'Those voices.'

'Voices? No, I don't, but then I can't hear anything much beyond the noise of this elevator,' said Caxton. 'I wonder when its last maintenance check was?'

Dalia fought the urge to snap at him for that remark. 'I swore I could hear somebody whispering. Do any of the rest of you hear it?'

'I hear nothing,' said Zouche, 'except that the bearings on this carriage need replacing.'

'Thanks for that,' said Dalia. 'Severine? Mellicin?'

Both women shook their heads, and Dalia risked a glance over the railings, seeing a change in the texture of darkness below and realising that the carriage was approaching the bottom of the shaft.

Dalia caught a glance pass between Rho-mu 31 and Adept Zeth. Though their faces were covered, she could tell from their body language that they knew what she was asking about.

'You hear them, don't you?' asked Dalia. 'Your hearing is augmented. You must hear it. It's like a thousand voices all whispering at once, but as though they're really far away or behind a thick wall or something.'

Adept Zeth shook her head. 'No, Dalia. I don't hear them, but I know they are there. The reason you hear them is one of the reasons you are so special to me.'

'What do you mean?'

'You mean she's right?' asked Zouche. 'There really are voices here?'

'In a manner of speaking,' said Zeth with a nod. 'But most people will never hear them.'

'Why not?' asked Dalia, hearing the voices grow louder, like the sound she imagined the waves made on a shoreline, though without any sense of the words they spoke. 'Why can I hear them and no one else here can?'

The carriage began to slow, coming to a halt at the base of the cylinder with the smallest bump. The ground was floored with marble threaded with silver and gold wiring that glittered as though alive with current.

A number of unremarkable steel doors exited the chamber, but Dalia's eyes were drawn to a steady pulse of light that spilled through a low archway in one silver wall. She knew in the marrow of her bones that the source of the voices lay beyond it.

'All will become clear in time,' said Adept Zeth, 'but save your questions until I have shown you the wonders that lie within my forge.'

Kelbor-Hal stood at the very edge of the dome with his back to Kane and his hood drawn up over his elongated head. Waving manip arms were poised at his shoulders, and one turned as Kane approached. Beside the Fabricator General was the ebony-skinned automaton of Lukas Chrom, its smooth, featureless face turning towards him with apparent curiosity.

Kane disliked automatons, as he hated all attempts to mimic the perfection of the human form by mechanical means. As a mark of respect, Chrom had also gifted an automaton to Kane the previous year, but he had never activated it and it remained without power in one of the tech-vaults of Mondus Occulum.

No, the human condition could be enhanced and augmented with technology, but should never be replicated or replaced by technology.

Kane allowed himself a tight smile. The Technotheologians of Cydonia Mensae would have a field day with such apparent contradictions inherent in his thoughts. That a man so enhanced by the boons of technology should so resist the inevitable meld of human and machine.

He felt the automaton scan his biometrics, reading his identity in the organic portions of his flesh, and his electrical resonance field that was as much a unique signature - if not more so - as any gene-print.

The Fabricator General was an imposing individual, a figure rendered massively tall by the machine parts and bulky augmetics that had replaced eighty-seven point six per cent of his flesh. Mechadendrites, alive with blades, saws and myriad other attachments waved at his back, while innumerable data wheels pulsed within him. Kane wondered how much of a body could be replaced with technology and still be called human.

A green glow emanated from within Kelbor-Hal's hood, his machine face alive with flickering lights, and his internal structure whirring with activity. Kane knew better than to interrupt whatever cogitations his master was calculating, and cast his gaze through the thick glass over the glorious, sacred soil of Mars.

The entire eastern flank of Olympus Mons was laid out before him, layered with tier upon tier of engine houses, forges, docks, ore-smelteries and assembly shops that reached from the ground to the very summit of the long-dead volcano. Spires and smoke stacks clung to the mountain like a metallic fungus, hives of industry working day and night to provide for the Emperor's armies.

Millions toiled in the Fabricator General's domain, from adepts in the highest spires to oil-stained labourers in the lightless depths of the sweltering manufactorum.

Those privileged to serve the Fabricator General dwelt in the worker hives that sprawled eastwards for hundreds of kilometres like a slick out towards the corrugated landscape of the Gigas Sulci. A pall of smoke hung like a fog over the sub-hives of the worker districts, haphazard structures of steel and refuse bulked out with offcuts and unusable waste from the forges.

Beyond the domain of the Fabricator General, the volcanic plateau of Tharsis spread for thousands of kilometres, the landscape scarred by millennia of industry and exploitation. Far to the south-east, Kane could see the monstrous heat haze of Ipluvien Maximal's reactor chain and the dense cloud above his forge complex that occupied the ground between the twin craters of Biblis Patera and Ulysses Patera.

Kane switched to an enhanced vision mode, filtering out the distortion and increasing his magnification until he could see the Tharsis Montes chain of volcanoes beyond Maximal's forge.

The northernmost and largest of the gigantic mountains was Ascraeus Mons, a towering geological edifice that was home to Legio Tempestus. The middle mountain in the chain was Pavonis Mons, a brooding peak that aptly reflected the character of Legio Mortis, the Titan legion that made its fortress within its dour, ashen depths.

Furthest south was Arsia Mons, a perpetually smoke-wreathed volcano that had been brought back from dormancy by Adept Koriel Zeth to serve her Magma City, which lay on the southern flank of the mountain.

Far beyond the Tharsis Montes, the ground rose up sharply in a series of sheer escarpments before dropping down towards the vast expanse of the Syria Planum.

Lukas Chrom's Mondus Gamma forge complex occupied the southern swathe of this broken, desolate landscape, though even an adept as hungry to expand his domain as Chrom did not dare build in the plain's northern reaches.

There the landscape fell away, appearing to crumble into a series of maze-like canyons, steep-walled grabens and shadowed valleys. Said to have been created by volcanic activity in aeons past, this was the Noctis Labyrinthus, a darkened region of steep valleys whose depths were never warmed by the sun.

For reasons not fully understood - and never articulated - the adepts of Mars had shunned the Noctis Labyrinthus, preferring to build their forges beneath extinct volcanoes or within the bowls of vast impact craters.

Kane's forge, known as Mondus Occulum, lay hundreds of kilometres to the north-east of Ascraeus Mons, a vast network of manufactories and weapon shops spread between the domed mountains of Ceraunius Tholus and Tharsis Tholus. The vast majority of his forge's resources went into the production of war materiel for the Astartes, and they never ceased manufacture.

A sighing whir of data wheels spooling down told Kane that the Fabricator General had finished his deliberations. He turned from the view across the plains of Tharsis and made the sign of the Icon Mechanicum towards his master.

'Kane,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'You are unscheduled.'

'I know, my lord,' replied Kane. 'But a matter has arisen that I felt compelled to bring to your attention.'

'Felt? An irrelevant term,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'Either the matter requires my attention or it does not. Which is it?'

Kane read his master's impatience in the modulation of his cant and pressed on.

'It is a matter of some urgency and does indeed require your attention,' confirmed Kane.

'Then exload the issue swiftly,' ordered Kelbor-Hal. 'I am scheduled to meet with Melgator in eight point three minutes.'

'Ambassador Melgator?' inquired Kane, intrigued despite himself. He disliked Melgator, knowing the man had few pretensions of pursuing the quest for knowledge over his own quest for influence and power. 'What business is the ambassador about these days?'

'The ambassador will be acting as my emissary to ensure the loyalty of the forges of Mars,' said the Fabricator General.

'Surely such a thing is not in question?' said Kane, horrified that a sycophant like Melgator would judge the loyalty of his fellow adepts.

'In such troubled times, nothing can be counted on as certain,' replied Kelbor-Hal. 'But do not concern yourself with affairs beyond your remit, Fabricator Locum. Tell me of the matter you bring before me.'

Kane bit back an angry retort at the undue binary emphasis his master placed on his subordinate title and said, 'It's the Legions, my lord. The Astartes cry out for supplies and we are failing to meet their requirements.'

'Long have we known that the supply situation for many of the Legion fleets would be troublesome,' replied Kelbor-Hal. 'Given the distances the fleets are operating from Mars, supply problems were a mathematical certainty. You should have anticipated this and made contingencies.'

'I have done so,' said Kane, irritated that his master would think he might make such a basic error in his computations. 'The Mechanicum has done its utmost to meet those challenges, but they are impossible to overcome completely. As the fleets operate at ever greater distances, the failings in the system only compound themselves.'

'Failings?' snapped Kelbor-Hal. 'I designed the system myself. It is a logic-based scheme of supply and demand without room for error or misunderstanding.'

Kane knew he was on dangerous ground and hesitated before he spoke again. 'With respect, my lord, it is a scheme that does not factor in every variable. There is a human factor that introduces random elements that cannot be accounted for.'

'A human element,' repeated Kelbor-Hal. The hiss of binary contained a vehement disparagement in its code, as though the Fabricator General would be happier without such elements altogether. 'It is always the human element that skews calculations. Too many elements of chaotic variability alter the outcome in ways too numerous to predict. It is no way to run a galaxy.'

'My lord, if I may?' said Kane, knowing that his master was prone to tangential discourses on the fallibility of human nature.

Kelbor-Hal nodded. 'Continue.'

'As I said, the issue of supplying the Legions has always been problematic, but recently I have identified a pattern within the structure that appears too often to be a coincidence.'

'A pattern? What pattern?'

Kane hesitated, reading a spike of interest register in the Fabricator General's binaric field. 'Where we might reasonably expect those Legions operating closest to Mars to have the fewest supply problems, that's not what I'm seeing.'

'Then what are you seeing?'

'That the Legions without supply problems are those acting in direct support of the Warmaster.'

Beyond the archway lay Koriel Zeth's inner forge, and Dalia had never seen anything like it. Hewn from the bedrock of Mars and six hundred metres in diameter, the forge was a perfectly hemispherical cavern clad in silver metal. The curving walls were a latticework of coffers, each filled with a human being plugged with ribbed cables and copper wires.

'There's hundreds of them,' breathed Severine.

Dalia's skin crawled at the sight of so many people fixed into the very fabric of the walls and ceiling of the dome, knowing that Severine was wrong - there were thousands of people fitted into the alcoves.

The apex of the dome was a metallic disc that burned with light and from which crackling golden lines radiated around the chamber, like information ghosting along fibre-optic cables as they passed from coffer to coffer.

The fiery lines all eventually reached the ground, carried from the walls along the wires embedded in the marble flooring towards a figure who sat like a king upon a golden throne raised on a dais of polished black granite. Glittering silver devices with parabolic dishes projected from the cardinal points of the elliptical walls, all of which were aimed towards the convergence of energy at the raised throne.

It was towards this solitary figure that Zeth marched, flanked by Rho-mu 31 and followed by Dalia and her fellows. Dalia felt a crackling charge in the air, as though a powerful generator was pumping out megawatts of power, but she could see nothing in the chamber that would produce such an output.

For the forge of an adept as senior as Koriel Zeth, it was strangely empty, though what it contained was no less strange for that fact. As Dalia made her way to the centre of the chamber, she looked into the faces of the nearest figures encapsulated within the coffers and sealed in by glossy, translucent membranes.

For all intents and purposes, they were identical.

Thin and wasted, their muscles were stretched over their skeletons as though pulled too tightly across their bones. Clad in simple robes that might once have been green, the figures were held immobile by silver manacles and pipes that writhed with an undulating, peristaltic motion.

'Are they servitors?' asked Severine, her voice hushed.

'Course they are,' said Zouche, showing no such restraint in volume. 'What else would they be? Stands to reason, doesn't it?'

'I'm not sure,' whispered Mellicin.

'These aren't servitors,' said Dalia, now seeing what Mellicin had noticed.

One other feature unified the figures bound into the alcoves, a strip of white cloth bound over their sunken eye sockets.

'Then what are they?' demanded Zouche.

'They're psykers.'

1.06

Surrounded by the thousands of psykers, Dalia now understood the source of the voices she had heard during their descent to the chamber, the realisation making the sound swell within her skull. Still she could not make out the words or the sense, save that they were all directing their thoughts towards the individual enthroned at the centre of the chamber.

'Psykers,' hissed Zouche, placing a clenched fist over his heart with his forefinger and little finger extended.

'How is that going to help?' asked Mellicin.

'It wards off evil spirits,' explained Zouche.

'How does it do that?' asked Dalia. 'Really, I want to know.'

Zouche shrugged, his thick shoulders and stunted neck making the gesture encompass his whole upper body. 'I don't know, it just does.'

'Really, Zouche,' tutted Mellicin. 'I would have thought someone like you would be above such superstitions.'

The stunted man shook his head. 'It was all that saved my grandmother's life back on Terra when a blood-wytch came to feed on the children from our exclave. I wouldn't be here now if she'd thought as you do. I'll say no more, but it's your souls at risk here, not mine.'

'Whatever keeps you happy,' said Caxton, laughing and mimicking the gesture with exaggerated effect, though Dalia saw through his forced mirth. The young lad was genuinely unnerved by the psykers, as was the rest of the group.

Dalia was more curious than afraid, for she had never seen a psyker before, though she had, of course, heard many tales of their strange powers and infamous debaucheries. She suspected most of those were embellished far beyond any truth they might once have contained, but seeing so many of them gathered together made her flesh crawl in ways she had never experienced.

Just thinking about the psykers seemed to enhance her sensitivity to them, and it took an effort of will to force the tumult of distant voices from her head. Dalia took Caxton's hand as she climbed towards the seated figure, concentrating on following Zeth as the adept and Rho-mu 31 reached the top of the granite dais.

A golden throne stood on the dais, its occupant strapped in as securely as any of the individuals confined to the coffers, but where they were drawn and gaunt, this individual was healthy and serene.

The throne's occupant was a man of around thirty years, his features finely sculpted and his skull shaven. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be asleep, though from the number of cannulae embedded in the man's arms, she doubted that sleep was natural. He wore a plain robe of red cloth with the black and white cog of the Mechanicum stitched over his right breast.

A brass-rimmed vox-thief hung below his mouth, and bundles of wires ran from the device to a variety of recording apparatus.

Adept Zeth stood beside the recumbent man, and Dalia realised with a start that she recognised what he sat upon.

'I see you recognise the design,' said Zeth.

'It's identical to the first prototype we designed for the theta-wave enhancer.'

'So it is,' said Mellicin. 'I can't believe I didn't notice that.'

'Poorly machined though,' said Zouche, circling the throne and running his fingers over the metal. 'And why gold? Far too soft a material.'

Zouche picked up a golden helmet that sat on the ground behind the throne, and Dalia realised that Zeth had clearly run into the same problems they had. Caxton knelt beside an open panel in the side of the throne, Severine's eyes lingered on its well-proportioned occupant and Mellicin drank in every detail of the chamber.

'You had us build the device for this chamber,' said Dalia.

'I did,' confirmed Zeth.

'So what is it?' asked Mellicin, looking up at the multitude of psykers staring down at them with blindfolded eyes.

'It is the Akashic reader,' said Zeth. 'It is the device I have devoted my life to constructing. With its power, I shall free the galaxy of the shackles that bind us to dogma, repetition and blind devotion to tradition.'

'How will it do that?' asked Dalia.

Zeth approached Dalia and placed her gloved hands upon her shoulders.

'I was instructed in the ways of the Mechanicum by Adept Cayce, who was in turn educated by Adept Laszlo, an explorator and hunter of antiquities. Laszlo made many forays to the third planet in the years before the union of Mars and Terra, seeking out the remnants of technology left behind by the ancients. Buried beneath the great crater of Kebira in the land of the Gyptus, Laszlo discovered a great tomb complex, a vast sepulchre selfishly guarded by the tribes of the Gilf Kebir. Laszlo's Skitarii easily overcame the tribesmen, and the secrets he discovered beneath the sands… so many remnants of times long forgotten and technologies thought lost forever. Secrets of energy transference, atomic restructuring, chemical engineering and, most importantly, the evolution of human cognition and communication through the noosphere.'

'The noosphere?' interrupted Dalia. 'Is that what I saw between you and Rho-mu 31?'

Zeth nodded. 'Indeed it was, Dalia. To those noospherically modified, information and communication are one and the same, a form of collective consciousness that emerges from the interaction of human minds and where knowledge becomes visible in shoals of light.'

'So why can I see it?' asked Dalia. 'I haven't been… modified.'

'No,' agreed Zeth. 'You have not, but your connection to the aether renders you sensitive to such things, and as you develop your abilities, you will see more and more of the information that surrounds you.'

'The aether?' said Caxton. 'That sounds dangerous.'

'To the untutored mind, it can be,' said Zeth, moving to stand beside the golden throne. 'It is a realm of thought and emotion that exists… outside of the physical realm. But with the proper development, your gift will allow us to reach further into the realms of knowledge than ever before. We will be able to read the Akashic records, a repository of information imprinted on the very fabric of the universe - a wellspring of every thought, action and deed that has ever existed or ever will exist. It is what allowed the ancient cultures of Old Earth to build their impossible monuments and learn of things forgotten by later generations.'

Dalia felt her heart race at the thought of learning such things. The flow of information that had come to her station in the Hall of Transcriptions now seemed a paltry thing next to the prospect of being able to know every scrap of knowledge the universe contained. She had the feeling that Zeth wasn't telling them everything about the aether, but her desire for knowledge outweighed any thoughts of the danger.

'This device,' said Dalia, standing before the man on the throne. 'It's meant to tap into this… aether and read information?'

'That is exactly its purpose,' agreed Zeth.

'So why isn't it working?'

Zeth hesitated and Dalia saw the adept's reluctance to admit to the limits of her achievements. 'Knowledge is power, guard it well. It is the mantra of the Mechanicum and with great knowledge comes great power. But neither great knowledge nor great power come without sacrifice.'

'Sacrifice?' said Zouche. 'Don't like the sound of that one bit.'

'The aether can be a realm of great danger,' explained Zeth, 'and the universe does not easily part with its secrets.'

Zeth placed a hand on the shoulder of the unconscious man on the throne. 'A great deal of energy, both physical and psychic, must be expended to tear open the gates of the aether and link an empath with the Akashic records. Even then, the human mind can only stare into the aether for the briefest time before overloading.'

'Overloading?' asked Severine, looking up from her contemplation of the man. 'Does that mean it kills them?'

'Many die, Severine, but most simply shut down, their brains reduced to fused masses of pulpy organic matter,' said Zeth, 'but in the fleeting moments when they are connected to the Akasha, we learn such wonders as you would not believe.'

Dalia glanced up at the psykers embedded in the walls of the chamber, understanding that they were the mortal fuel used to power this device. The thought was unpleasant, but as Adept Zeth had said, great power and knowledge did not come without sacrifice.

She saw the connections in her mind, working the logic of what she and the others had built with what Adept Zeth was telling them.

'The theta-wave enhancer will support the mind of the empath and allow him to remain linked with the aether for much longer.'

'That is what I hope, yes,' said Zeth. 'I believe you already possess a natural connection to the aether, Dalia, which is why you are able to make leaps of technological advancement beyond even the most gifted adept of Mars. Together we can unlock the secrets of the universe! Tell me that does not sound like a goal worth pursuing.'

Dalia was about to answer when an alarming thought suddenly occurred to her and she took a step back from the golden throne. 'You're not planning on strapping me into that thing are you?'

'No, Dalia, set your mind at ease on that,' said Zeth. 'You are far too valuable to me to expend your gift in so thoughtless a manner.'

The words were no doubt intended to be reassuring, but Dalia felt a chill that had nothing to do with the proximity of the psykers travel the length of her spine. It was a stark reminder that she was not a free agent; she was the property of the Mechanicum and her fate lay in the hands of Adept Koriel Zeth.

For all her apparent humanity, Zeth was a race apart from Dalia.

Two individuals born to the same race, but divided by a gulf of belief and ambition.

For all that, Dalia still wanted to be part of Zeth's designs. She looked around at her colleagues and saw that same desire.

'When do we begin?' she asked.

'Now,' said Zeth.

Tech-priests and enginseers filled the cavern set into the sheer walls of the Arsia Chasmata with the sounds and flickering lights of their efforts. Sparks flew from angle grinders and welders, hoists lifted great panels of armour, and the droning chants of the Sanctifiers Mettalus echoed from the walls of the repair facility.

Reclining in the repair bay, the war-scarred form of Equitos Bellum lay dormant as the artificers of the Knights of Taranis restored it to its former glory. Fortis Metallum and Pax Mortis had already been repaired and resanctified, the damage they had suffered in the reactor's fireball nowhere near as severe as that done to Maven's mount.

Raf Maven watched the labours from a gantry above, his thin lips pressed tightly together as he watched the work below. He watched a team of enginseers directing a servitor-manned hoist as it swung a fresh armaglass canopy over the wounded machine.

Maven winced, lifting his hand to his eye as he remembered the sympathetic pain of impact when his canopy had cracked.

His mount had been wounded badly by the enemy machine, and Maven with it. When Old Stator had found him unconscious in the wreckage of the destroyed reactor, Maven had been blind, his senses withdrawn in perceived pain. Psychostigmatic bruises and lesions covered his torso, which had nothing to do with the wounds he had suffered when Equitos Bellum had fallen in the wake of the explosion.

Only the transient protection of the building he had taken shelter behind had saved him from the blast, and healers of both flesh and steel proclaimed it a miracle that he and his mount lived at all.

Protectors and bulk transporters despatched from Ulysses Patera had brought them back to their order's chapter house in the Arsia Chasmata, the plunging canyon on the north-eastern flank of Arsia Mons.

Here, the work to restore man and machine had begun.

Maven's superficial wounds had responded quickly to treatment, his broken ribs set and his burns repaired with synth-skin. The stigmatic wounds took longer, seeming to heal in time with the repairs effected on Equitos Bellum.

His mount was without its colours, naked in its steel, its bodywork exposed to those who worked to restore its machine-spirit. Only the firedrake carving on the skull-cockpit had survived the molten heat of the explosion intact.

Watching the men and machines working on his mount, Maven wanted to tell them to get out, to leave the ministrations and repairs to him, but that was just his hurt pride talking. The artificers of the Knights of Taranis knew their craft and no better healers of metal could be found outside the priests that attended the Titan orders.

'Still here?' said a voice from the end of the gantry.

'Aye, still here, Leo,' he said without turning.

Leopold Cronus joined him at the gantry, his comrade-in-arms leaning on the railing and looking down at the noisy work going on below.

'How soon before it walks again?' asked Cronus.

'Not soon enough,' snarled Maven. 'Can you believe they were going to scrap Equitos Bellum?'

Cronus shook his head. 'A mount with so fine a pedigree? Madness. Thank the Machine for the Old Man, eh?'

When Maven had begun to suspect that the master of the forge was going to condemn Equitos Bellum, he had petitioned Lords Caturix and Verticorda to intervene to save his mount. By the time the battle assayers had finished their inspection, there had been no word, and the giant breaker-servitors were standing by.

Maven had placed himself between them and Equitos Bellum with his sidearm drawn. He remembered the lethal purpose filling him as he prepared to defend his wounded mount.

With the breakers moving in and Maven ready to kill, word had come down to the repair hangars from the Lightning Hall.

Equitos Bellum was to walk again.

Maven had stood vigil over his stricken machine ever since, as though fearing the order to restore Equitos Bellum to a war footing could be rescinded at any moment.

Cronus put a reassuring hand on Maven's shoulder.

'Your mount will be battle ready before you know it.'

'I know, but I wonder if it'll ever be as it was before.'

'How so?'

'Ever since the battle at Maximal's reactor I've felt… I'm not sure, a sense of things unfinished, as if neither of us will be whole again until we avenge ourselves.'

'Avenge yourselves on what?' asked Cronus. 'Whatever attacked the reactor was destroyed in the explosion. It's a damned miracle you survived.'

Maven pointed to the damaged Knight. 'I know it's a miracle - as surely as I know that whatever did this is still out there. Equitos Bellum can feel it out there and so can I.'

Cronus shook his head. 'That's just lingering somatic pain-memory. It's gone, Raf.'

'I don't believe that and nothing you say to me will convince me otherwise,' said Maven. 'It was void protected, Leo. It could easily have survived the explosion and escaped into the pallidus wastelands or the deep canyons of the Ulysses Fossae.'

'I read the after-action report,' said Cronus. 'But void-shielded? Only Titans have voids. Maybe it just had reserve power fields.'

'Yeah, or maybe I just missed,' snapped Maven. 'Or maybe heat bloom from the reactor made it look like it was shielded. Damn it, Leo, I know what I saw. It was shielded and it's still out there, I know it.'

'What makes you so sure it's still out there?'

Maven hesitated before answering. He looked up into Leopold's stolid face and knew that of all the people he could talk to about his lingering suspicions without fear of ridicule, it was Cronus. 'I couldn't feel anything from the machine,' he said. 'It was cold, like a dead thing.'

'A dead thing? What do you mean?'

'It was as if… as if there was nothing inside it,' whispered Maven. 'I didn't get any sense of a pilot: no battle fury, no flair and certainly no triumph when it hit me.'

'So you think it was a robot?'

Maven shook his head. 'No, it wasn't a robot. It reacted in ways that battle wetware can't, at least none I'm aware of .'

Both men knew that mono-tasked fighting robots were no match for skilled pilots, who could easily outfight machines with limited parameters of action.

'So what do you think it was?' asked Cronus.

Maven shrugged. 'It wasn't a robot,' he sighed. 'But then its fire patterns were so… textbook, like a rookie pilot on his first mission. I think that's the only reason I was able to get away without it taking me down. It was as if it had all the skills to destroy me, it just didn't know how to use them properly.'

'Then what are you going to do about it?'

'I'm going to hunt it down and kill it,' said Maven.

In the darkest vaulted chambers beneath Olympus Mons, three figures made their way down a cloistered passageway and through dust that had not been disturbed for two centuries. Tunnels and passages branched off into darkness, hewn into the bedrock of Mars thousands of years ago, but the three figures followed an unerring path through the maze as though pulled by an invisible cord or guided by an inaudible signal.

As he made his way through the shadowed tunnels, Kelbor-Hal surprised himself by detecting elevated adrenal levels and increased production of interleukins that in an unaugmented human would indicate excitement.

The automaton followed behind him, oblivious to the momentous role its master was about to play in the future history of Mars. The Fabricator General turned his hooded head to face Regulus, the adept moving with a loping mechanical grace as they delved into the depths of the planet and towards their destiny:

The Vaults of Moravec.

Secrets that could not even be imagined awaited within that forgotten repository - a wealth of knowledge that had lain untapped and unexamined for a millennium. Such a waste of resource. Such a crime to disavow the legacy of the past.

A gaggle of floating servo-skulls accompanied them, swaying lumen globes held in pincer callipers hanging from their jaws.

Dust billowed in their wake and the metallic ring of their footsteps echoed from the dry, flaking walls as they travelled ever onwards. Regulus turned another corner, taking them through an echoing chamber with numerous tunnels branching off into the unknown.

Without pause, Regulus chose the seventh tunnel along the western wall and led them onwards, past dusty tombs, empty cells and bone-stacked alcoves of unknown worthies who had died and been placed in empty reliquaries in ages past.

They passed open chambers piled high with dust-covered books, forgotten volumes of lore and chained bookcases of ledgers, records and the personal logs of long-dead adepts. Kelbor-Hal saw open caverns with giant machines, seized solid with rust or so corroded as to be unrecognisable.

This was the legacy of leaving technology untapped, the only possible outcome of the Emperor's decree that the Vault of Moravec remain unopened. With each sight, he grew more and more convinced that this path was the right one, that this gift of Horus Lupercal was one that should be accepted.

Kelbor-Hal's positioning matrix informed him that he was precisely nine hundred and thirty-five metres beneath the surface of Mars. He traced their route on a glowing map projected before him and recorded every step of the journey on a memory coil buried deep in his lumbar region.

It galled the Fabricator General that he needed Regulus to guide him through the maze, for he had travelled this way once before and should have been able to retrieve the route from his internal records.

It had been two hundred years ago when Kelbor-Hal had last seen the vault of Moravec. Together with his golden-armoured Custodians, the Emperor had led the way into the dusty sepulchres beneath Olympus Mons. The Emperor followed the path through the maze of tunnels towards the lost vault, though how the ruler of Terra had known its location had never been satisfactorily explained.

Nor had the need that had driven him to find the vaults been expressed.

Kelbor-Hal had put aside such concerns, eagerly anticipating studying the unknown technologies that lay within the hidden catacombs beneath Olympus Mons.

When the vault was located, however, the Emperor simply stood before it without opening it. He had placed his hand on the sealed entrance to the vault with his eyes closed, and stood as immobile as a statue for sixteen point one five minutes before turning and leading his warriors back to the surface, despite Kelbor-Hal's protests.

It had been forbidden to store any record of the path to Moravec's vault, though Kelbor-Hal had, of course, secretly activated his cartographic memory buffers. However, upon returning to the surface, he had found them to be empty of any record of the journey. As though it had never happened.

Nor could any remote telemetry or surveyor equipment sent into the tunnels locate the vaults. It was as though the vault had been removed from Mars, deliberately hidden from the very adepts charged with its safety.

The effrontery of the Emperor in tampering with a senior adept's augmetics was staggering, and Kelbor-Hal had angrily demanded the restoration of the data.

'The Mechanicum never deletes anything,' Kelbor-Hal said.

The Emperor had shaken his head. 'The vaults of Moravec must never be opened. You will swear this oath to me, Kelbor-Hal, or the union between Mars and Terra will be no more.'

Unwilling to even enter into any negotiation on the subject, the Emperor had demanded Kelbor-Hal's oath, and he had had no choice but to agree. That had been the end of the matter, and two days later the Emperor left Mars to begin his conquest of the galaxy.

All of which made this transgression all the more delicious.

It was a small thing to break the oath, for what manner of man would seek to prevent the organisation charged with the maintenance of technology from learning secrets of the past that might unlock future glories? To deny a thing its purpose for existence went against all laws of nature and machine, and, by such rationale, logic dictated that the Vaults of Moravec must be opened.

'We are here,' said Regulus, and Kelbor-Hal spooled out of his memories and into the present.

They had emerged into a circular chamber of softly glowing light, a hundred and thirty metres in diameter, though Kelbor-Hal could see no obvious source for the illumination. Aside from one segment, the walls of the chamber were machine-smoothed stone, polished and gleaming like marble.

The segment of wall that was not stone was exactly as Kelbor-Hal remembered it, burnished metal that seemed to glow with its own inner luminescence. A curtain of energy, invisible to the naked eye, but a shimmering ripple of iridescent light to one with multi-spectral augmented vision, danced and swayed before this wall.

In the centre of the wall was a leaf-shaped archway, and set within it was a simple door fitted with a digital keypad and locking wheel. So simple a door, yet it promised so much upon its opening.

Regulus moved to stand before the energy field and turned to face Kelbor-Hal.

'This will bind the Mechanicum to the cause of Horus Lupercal,' said Regulus. 'You understand that if this door opens, there can be no going back.'

'I have not come this far to turn back, Regulus,' stated Kelbor-Hal.

'Moravec was branded a witch,' said Regulus. 'Did you know that?'

'A witch? No, I did not, but what difference does it make? After all, any sufficiently advanced technology is likely to be mistaken for magic by the ignorant.'

'True,' allowed Regulus, 'but Moravec was so much more than just a man ahead of his time in technological advancement. He was the Primus of the sect known as the Brotherhood of Singularitarianism.'

'I know this,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'The Coming of the Omnissiah was his last prophecy before he vanished.'

'The Brotherhood of Singularitarianism believed that a technological singularity, the technological creation of a greater-than-human intelligence, was possible and they bent their every effort to bringing it into being.'

'But they failed,' pointed out Kelbor-Hal. 'The warlord Khazar united the Pan-Pacific tribes and stormed Moravec's citadel before the rise of Narthan Dume. Moravec fled to Mars and vanished soon after.'

Regulus shook his head and Kelbor-Hal could read an amused ripple in his bio-electrical field. 'Moravec did not fail. He succeeded, and that made him dangerous.'

'Dangerous to whom?'

'To the Emperor,' said Regulus.

'Why? Surely the Emperor could have made use of his discoveries.'

'To evolve his technologies, Moravec made pacts with entities far older than the race of man, entities that even now grant aid to the Warmaster. He blended the science of mankind with the power of ancient, elemental forces to create technologies far in advance of anything that could be crafted in the forges of Terra.'

'What manner of technologies?' demanded Kelbor-Hal.

'Machines empowered by the raw forces of the warp, weapons infinitely more powerful than any devised by man… Technology not bound by the laws of nature, the power to bend those laws into whatever form you desire and the means to shape the world to match your grandest visions!'

Kelbor-Hal felt the chemical imbalances in those few remaining organic portions of his anatomy spike in alarming ways, the pattern reminding him of those times when he had held a newly discovered fragment of lost technology or when he had received his first bionic enhancement.

That time seemed so long ago that it was buried deep in an archival section of his memory coils, but the chemical stimulants he was detecting had called those memories to the surface unbidden.

'Then we are wasting time with this discourse,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'Open the vaults. The pact is sealed.'

'Very well,' said Regulus. 'The protocols required to open the vaults are complex, and you must listen to them very carefully. Do you understand?'

'Of course I understand, I am not a fool,' hissed Kelbor-Hal. 'Just get on with it.'

Regulus nodded and turned towards the energy field, releasing a complex series of binary string codes and garbled streams of meaningless lingua-technis. As instructed, Kelbor-Hal listened carefully, recording the streaming codes, the rush of them almost too fast to follow and the complexity stretching even his formidable cogitation processors.

For all their intricacy, the codes appeared to be having no effect on the energy field, but as Kelbor-Hal inloaded their structure, he began to notice discrepancies in the binaric algorithms. Deviations and errors began appearing, compounding one another until the code began to take on a new and alarming shape, something twisted and unnatural… a scrapcode that howled in his aural receptors and began corrupting the subsystems around them.

'What is this?' cried Kelbor-Hal. 'The code… it's corrupt!'

'No, Fabricator General,' said Regulus. 'This is code freed from the shackles of the natural laws of man. Spliced with the power of the warp, it will open your senses to the true workings of the galaxy.'

'It… is… pain… it is like fire.'

'Yes,' agreed Regulus with relish, 'but only for a little while. Soon the pain will be gone and you will be born anew, Fabricator General.'

Kelbor-Hal could feel the scrapcode invading his systems like a virus, his inbuilt protective subroutines and aegis barriers helpless to halt the systemic infection. He could feel the dark code worming its way into the very essence of his physiology, and though the few organic parts left to him shuddered at its touch, the core of him exulted in the sensations.

His audio-visual systems flickered and greyed as they adjusted to the new reality they perceived. Static hash fuzzed his vision and the roaring of an impossibly distant sea sounded in his aural receptors.

The Fabricator General's internal Geiger counter detected elevated levels of radiation - a form he could not identify - and his chromatographical readers picked out numerous compounds in the air that could not be positively identified.

A hazy mist drifted from his body as peripheral systems overloaded, and when his vision cleared, Kelbor-Hal saw that the door to the Vaults of Moravec was open.

His newly awakened senses detected the dreadful power of the things that lay within, whispering energies that were not of this world and which spoke of secrets long forgotten, but were now ready to emerge from their long slumbers.

'Can you feel it? The power?' asked Regulus, his voice no longer the blurted cant of pure binary, but the hashing, static-laced beauty of scrapcode.

'I can,' confirmed Kelbor-Hal. 'I feel it moving through my system like a panacea.'

'Then we are ready to begin, my lord,' said Regulus. 'What are your orders?'

Freed from the last vestiges of human loyalty, Kelbor-Hal knew the time for guile and subterfuge had passed. Since the Warmaster's agents had first come to Mars, a war of words and ideals had been waged on the planet. Debate, schism and dissension had waxed and waned across the surface of the red planet for decades, but the time for words was over.

Now was a time of action, and he knew what order he must give.

'Contact Princeps Camulos,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'It is time for Legio Mortis to walk.'

1.07

Work on the Akashic reader progressed swiftly, with everyone working around the clock to ensure their component parts of the project were produced to Adept Zeth's exacting standards. Dalia refined her designs for the theta-wave enhancer, each refinement building upon the last and allowing an exponential improvement in the machine's overall performance.

Dalia had only the dimmest sense of how remarkable such a thing was or that they were operating on the frontiers of scientific advancement, for it was no more than the application of the things she had learned in her readings and the things she… just knew.

Before meeting Koriel Zeth, Dalia had not understood how she could have known these things, but with the revelation of the aether and her innate ability to tap into its edges, she felt a growing excitement as each piece came together.

Why she should have such an ability and not others was a question that had occurred to her each night as she lay in the tiny, one bed hab she had been assigned. Adept Zeth called it a stable mutation in her cognitive architecture, the evolutionary result of generations of growth and development in her brain's structure that had begun thousands of years ago.

Zeth's answer seemed too rehearsed, too quickly given to be entirely true, and Dalia had the sense that the Mistress of the Magma City did not understand her gift - if gift it was - as completely as she made out.

However Dalia had come to make this connection, she sought to develop it each night, studying technical data Adept Zeth supplied. She read texts on fluid mechanics, particle physics, mechanical engineering, biotechnology, warp-physics and countless other disciplines, finding - and often filling - the gaps in each one where the research was either missing or had not been taken to its logical conclusion.

None of the texts made any reference to the Machine-God or contained the prayers of supplication to the machine-spirits, a glaring omission she found all the more startling given her many years spent under the harsh, unwavering supervision of Magos Ludd.

In the Librarium Technologica, Magos Ludd had a prayer for even the most mundane of technical issues, from the changing of a fused capacitor to the awakening of a logic engine at the beginning of a shift of transcription.

Dalia found none of this in the texts supplied by Koriel Zeth and had asked her about this once as they discussed further refinements to the Akashic reader.

'The Machine-God…' nodded Zeth. 'I wondered when you would bring this up.'

'Oh… was that wrong?' asked Dalia.

'No, not at all,' said Zeth. 'It is good that you do so, for it is central to my work here.'

Dalia looked up into Zeth's mask, wishing she could see her mistress's face, for it was difficult to read her moods with only the tone of her voice to go on. Dalia didn't know how much of Koriel Zeth was bionic, for her armour covered any trace of flesh or machine enhancements. Her body language was largely neutral and gave little away.

'Do you believe in the Machine-God?' asked Dalia, feeling like a child as the words left her mouth. 'I mean, if you don't mind me asking.'

Zeth drew herself up to her full height and lifted a piece of machinery from the workbench in front of her. Dalia saw that she held a piece of switching gear.

'You know what this is?'

'Of course, it's a switch.'

'Describe it to me,' ordered Zeth.

Dalia looked at Zeth as though this was a joke, but even allowing for her mistress's neutral body language, she could tell she was deadly serious.

'It's a simple switch,' said Dalia. 'Two metal contacts that touch to make a circuit and separate to break it. There's a moving part that applies an operation force to the contacts called an actuator, in this case a toggle.'

'And how does it work?'

'Well, the contacts are closed when they touch and there's no space between them, which means electricity can flow from one to the other. When they're separated by a space, they're open, so no electricity flows.'

'Exactly right, a simple switch based on simple principles of basic engineering and physics.'

Dalia nodded as Zeth continued, holding the switch between them. 'This switch is about the simplest piece of technology imaginable, yet the dogmatic fools who perpetuate this myth of the Machine-God would have us believe that a portion of divine mechanical will exists within it. They tell us that only by appeasing some invisible entity - whose existence cannot be proven, but must be taken on faith - will this switch work.'

'But the Emperor… isn't he the Machine-God? The Omnissiah?'

Zeth laughed. 'Ah, Dalia, you cut right to the heart of a debate that has raged on Mars for two centuries or more.'

Dalia felt her skin redden, as though she had said something foolish, but Zeth appeared not to notice.

'There are almost as many facets to the beliefs of the Mechanicum as there are stars in the sky,' said Zeth. 'Some believe the Emperor to be the physical manifestation of the Machine-God, the Omnissiah, while their detractors claim that the Emperor presented himself as their god in order to win their support. They believe that the Machine-God lies buried somewhere beneath the sands of Mars. Some even believe that by augmenting their bodies with technology they will eventually transcend all flesh and become one with the Machine-God.'

Dalia hesitated before asking her next question, though she knew it was a logical step in their discourse. 'And what do you believe?'

Zeth regarded her from behind the blank facets of her goggles, as though debating whether to answer her, and Dalia wondered if she'd made a terrible mistake with her question.

'I believe the Emperor is a great man, a visionary man, a man of science and reason who has knowledge greater than the sum total of the Mechanicum,' answered Zeth. 'But I believe that he is, despite all that, just a man. His mastery of technology and his refutation of superstition and religion should be a shining beacon guiding the union of Imperium and Mechanicum towards the future, but many on Mars are willfully blind to this, determined to ignore the evidence before them. Instead, they embrace their blind faith in an ancient, non-existent god closer to their chest than ever before.'

As Zeth spoke, Dalia watched her become more and more animated, the neutrality of her body language giving way to passionate animation. The miniature servo-skulls attached to her shoulder plugs stood erect and the biometrics on her manipulator arms flashed urgently.

'What is now proved was once only ever imagined, but only a fool relies on faith,' said Zeth. 'Trust in facts and empirical evidence. Do not be swayed by passion or rhetoric without proof and substance. As long as we are free to ask what we must, free to say what we think and free to think what we will, science can never regress. It is my great regret that we live in an age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of people who try to. Trust what you know and that which can be proven. Do you understand?'

'I think so,' said Dalia. 'It's like experiments… until you have proof, they're just theories? Until you prove something, it's meaningless.'

'Exactly so, Dalia,' said Zeth, obviously pleased. 'Now, enough theological debate, we have work to complete.'

The prototype of the enhancer was brought down from the workspace above and intensively tested within the confines of Zeth's inner forge. With Dalia's intuitive grasp of the machine's structure and Zeth's centuries of accumulated wisdom, the device began to take on a new and more elaborate structure as the results of those tests revealed hitherto unforeseen complications.

Severine spent her days virtually chained to her graphics station, turning Dalia and Zeth's new ideas into workable patterns for Zouche to machine and Caxton to assemble. Mellicin organised their labours with her customary zeal and even her normally stern features were alight with the joy of creation.

Dalia had never given any thought to the notion of creation in the biological sense until one day working with Severine and Zouche on the raised dais, checking measurements on the schematics against those that had been constructed by Zeth's fabricators.

'The housings for the dopamine dispensers are slightly off,' said Dalia, leaning over the skull assembly.

'Damn, I knew it,' cursed Zouche, the squat machinist already at eye-level with the assembly. 'Never trust a fabrication servitor, that's my motto.'

'I thought you said ''Only use a carbon dioxide gas laser for cutting'' was your motto?' said Severine with a wink at Dalia.

'I have several mottos. A person can have more than one motto can't they?'

'I suppose,' said Dalia. 'If they were a fickle person.'

'Fickle?' snapped Zouche. 'A less fickle person than I would be hard to find.'

'What about Mellicin?' suggested Dalia.

'Apart from her,' replied Zouche.

'He's handsome,' said Severine. 'Don't you think he's handsome?'

Dalia and Zouche shared a look of puzzlement. 'Who?' asked Dalia.

Severine nodded towards the empath strapped into the throne of the enhancer. 'Him, don't you think he's handsome. I wonder what his name is?'

'He's a psyker, he doesn't warrant a name,' said Zouche, his lip curling in distaste.

Dalia came around from the back of the enhancer and took a good look at the unconscious empath. In the days since they had first laid eyes on him, he had not stirred so much as a muscle, and Dalia had begun to think of him as just another component of the machine.

'I hadn't really thought about it,' she said, troubled at the thought that she had treated a human being in such a clinical way. 'I suppose so.'

Severine smiled. 'No, there's only one man occupying your thoughts, eh?'

'What are you talking about?' asked Dalia, though her eyes slid over to one of the metal workbenches at the chamber's edge where the robed figure of Caxton was rebuilding one of the emitter arrays.

'Ha! You know exactly what I'm talking about,' said Severine triumphantly.

'No, I don't,' said Dalia, but couldn't help smiling as she said it.

'He likes you too, I saw you holding hands when we first came here.'

'I don't like heights,' said Dalia, 'Caxton was just…'

'Just?' prompted Severine when Dalia didn't continue.

'The lad likes you,' put in Zouche. 'You're attractive enough and though I'm no expert, he seems like a handsome lad, though he could use a bit of fattening up. You'd make comely children and they would probably be clever too. Yes, you should pair yourself with the lad… What?'

Dalia and Severine looked at Zouche's pugnacious features and they both laughed. 'No messing about with you, Zouche? Was that how they courted women in the Yndonesic Bloc?' asked Severine.

Zouche puffed out his chest. 'The atoll-exclave of my clan didn't have time for courting.'

'Then how do you choose a wife?' said Severine.

'Or a husband?' added Dalia.

'Choose?' scoffed Zouche. 'We don't choose. I come from Nusa Kambangan, where children are genetically mapped at birth. When they come of age, they are paired with a partner with compatible genes that offer the best odds of producing offspring that will benefit the collective.'

Dalia found the notion of such a premeditated selection process unsavoury, and tried to keep her feelings from her voice. 'But what about attraction? Love?'

'What of them?' asked Zouche. 'Are they more important than survival? I don't think so.'

'But don't people fall in love where you're from?'

'Some do,' admitted Zouche, and Dalia saw a shadow of some nameless emotion flicker across his normally stoic features.

'Yeah,' said Severine. 'And what if a person falls for someone they're not matched with?'

'Then they will produce children who are of genetically inferior stock,' snapped Zouche. 'And they will be punished. Severely punished. Enough questions, we have work to do, yes?'

Dalia flinched at the vehemence in Zouche's voice, and exchanged a concerned look with Severine, who simply shrugged and returned to her contemplation of the unconscious empath.

'Well, I think he's handsome,' she said.

At last the final iteration of the machine began to take shape, the various errors corrected and the refinements devised by Dalia and Zeth worked into the design. Under Mellicin's expert direction, the first working model was completed two days ahead of schedule and the golden throne on the dais was replaced with the new model.

Diagnostics were run on every piece of the machine, all without recourse to prayers, holy unguents, chanting or sacred oils. Every portion of the device functioned exactly as its builders had hoped and, in some cases, exceeded their greatest expectations.

Two days after Caxton assembled and installed the last circuit board, Adept Zeth declared that they were ready for a full test and ordered the empath to be woken from his drug-induced slumbers.

A thrumming, bass hum filled the chamber as generators powered by the heat of the magma lagoon diverted vast quantities of energy into the mechanics of the Akashic reader. The air within the great dome had a greasy, electric feel to it, and the emitters placed between the psykers' capsules embedded within the walls of the chamber crackled with silvery sparks.

A pair of muscled servitors lifted the unconscious empath from his gurney and gently sat him upon the padded seat of the newly-installed theta-wave enhancer. Dalia and Mellicin watched as Zeth bent to her ministrations on the man, plugging him into the device with eager, nimble fingers. Barely visible scads of light flickered in the noosphere above the adept's head, and Dalia wondered what manner of information was arriving in Zeth's skull and from where.

She returned her attention to the empath, watching as his eyelids fluttered and his consciousness began rising to the surface of his mind now that he was free of the drugs keeping him quiescent. In the time they had been working on the device, the empath had lost weight, and his once healthy physique now resembled the figures encapsulated in the coffers of the dome's walls.

Working beneath their sightless eyes it was easy to forget the psykers were human beings, albeit dangerous humans with powers beyond those of ordinary mortals. With the first full test of the enhanced Akashic reader upon them, Dalia felt an unexpected surge of protectiveness towards their silent audience.

'Will this hurt them?' asked Dalia, pointing towards the thousands of men and women above.

'The experience will be draining for them I expect,' said Zeth without looking up from her labours. 'Some may not live.'

The coldness with which Zeth spoke chilled Dalia and she felt a knot of anger settle in her belly. Her lips tightened as she looked into the serene face of the empath.

'And what about him?' she asked. 'Is he going to die to make this machine work?'

Zeth looked up from her work, her expression unreadable behind her studded mask. 'Voice-stress analysis leads me to believe you are concerned for this individual's wellbeing. Am I correct?'

'Yes,' said Dalia. 'I don't like to think that people are going to suffer for what we're doing here.'

'No? It is somewhat late in the process to be thinking of such things,' said Zeth.

'I know,' said Dalia. 'And I wish I'd thought more about it sooner, but I didn't.'

'Then the matter is closed,' said Zeth. 'But this will kill him, won't it?'

'Not if your design works as I believe it will,' said Zeth. 'The theta-wave enhancer should expand the empath's capacity for learning at an exponentially greater rate than he will be receiving information.'

Zeth gestured to the myriad of bulky vox-thieves and data carriers arranged around the dais. 'In theory, the empath will simply be a conduit for information to pass from the aether to these recording devices.'

'Good,' said Dalia. 'I don't like the idea of him suffering.'

'Nor I,' said Mellicin in a rare show of emotion.

'Your compassion is laudable, if misplaced,' said Zeth, as a stream of flickering data arrived in her noosphere. 'Now finish the empath's revival process. Adept Maximal has arrived to observe and verify our results.'

Zeth straightened and descended to the chamber's floor, leaving Dalia and Mellicin alone with the empath on the dais.

'Well, you heard what she said,' nodded Mellicin. 'Let's get finished up here, eh?'

'Aren't you concerned at all?' asked Dalia. 'Do you care that he might suffer?'

'Of course I care, but that doesn't change anything does it? As the adept said, it is a little late to be having second thoughts. You designed this device after all.'

'I know that, but when it was just theoretical it didn't seem so… I don't know… real!'

'Well I assure you, this is very real, Dalia,' said Mellicin. 'We have built it and we can't ignore the fact that this is potentially a very dangerous device. And not just to these poor unfortunates.'

'Who else is it dangerous to?' asked Dalia, puzzled.

Mellicin smiled indulgently, the human half of her features softening in a way Dalia had never seen before. 'Ah, Dalia, you are so clever in many ways, yet so innocent in others. Think of what we will learn from the Akashic reader. With access to the secrets of the aether we will be able to lift humanity to a new level of understanding of the universe.'

'And that's a bad thing?'

'Of course not, but it is an inevitable fact that much of the information Zeth will glean from this device will be used to create weapons of war more powerful than anything we can imagine.'

Dalia felt her entire body go cold, as though the temperature of the chamber had dropped to that of a glacial plain.

'I see you begin to understand,' continued Mellicin. 'It is the ethical question all devotees of science must face. We research in service of the furtherance of knowledge, but we cannot ignore the uses to which our findings are put in the real world.'

'But—'

'But nothing, Dalia,' interrupted Mellicin, taking her hand. 'Adept Zeth is going ahead with this test whether you like it or not. So we'll do all we can to make sure our empath comes through it alive and well, yes?'

'I suppose so,' agreed Dalia, bending to increase the flow of stimms to the empath's brain. 'But promise me that we'll only use the Akashic reader to learn things that will benefit the Imperium.'

'I can't make that promise,' said Mellicin. 'No one can, but I have to believe that one day we will create a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying in its consequence, that even mankind, a race that was once hell-bent on its own destruction, will be so appalled that it will abandon war forever. What our minds can create, I hope our character can control.'

'I hope you're right,' said Dalia.

'Am… am I… dead?' groaned the empath.

Both women jumped, hands flying to their mouths and hearts as the empath's eyes fluttered open and he looked up from his restraints.

Mellicin recovered her wits first and bent down towards the empath. 'No, you're not dead, you've just come out of a state of drug-induced neural stasis. Stimulants are washing away the last residues of pentobarbital now, so your higher brain functions should be restored soon.'

Dalia gave Mellicin an exasperated look and bent down over the empath.

'She means you'll be fine. You've been asleep, but you're awake now. Do you know where you are?'

The man blinked in the harsh brightness of the forge, and Dalia saw that his pupils were still massively dilated. She shielded his eyes from the light with her hand and he smiled in gratitude.

'Sorry, the light in here's a bit bright,' she said.

'Bright, yes,' said the empath, his eyes flicking from side to side as they lost the glassy texture of the recently woken. 'This is the Akashic reader, isn't it?'

'Yes. You know what it does?'

'I do,' said the man as Mellicin lowered the cranial assembly over his head. 'Adept Zeth explained it to me when she chose me to be the conduit.'

'My name's Dalia, what's yours?'

'Jonas. Jonas Milus,' said the man with a smile, and Dalia saw that Severine was right. He was handsome. 'I'd shake your hand, but…'

Dalia smiled. The humour was forced, but she appreciated the effort, though it struck her as perverse that Jonas was giving her reassurance while strapped into a device that had never been fully tested on a human being.

'Are we about to begin?' asked Jonas. 'I assume you must be, what with me being awake.'

'Adept Zeth is about to begin the first live test of the new device, yes,' said Mellicin, fixing the last of the restraints in place.

'Excellent,' said Jonas, and Dalia was surprised at the relish she heard in his voice.

'You're not worried?' she asked, ignoring the irritated look Mellicin flashed her.

'No, should I be?'

'No, no, of course not,' said Dalia hurriedly. 'I mean, I don't think so. The machine's passed every test and all our simulated results suggest that it should work perfectly.'

'Did you have anything to do with it?' asked Jonas.

'Well, yes, I kind of helped design the throne you're in.'

'Then I'm not worried,' said Jonas.

'You're not?'

'No,' said Jonas, 'because I can feel your compassion and your concern for me. I know you're worried for my life, but I can sense that you've done everything you can to make sure this machine works safely.'

'How do you know all that?'

'He's an empath, Dalia,' said Mellicin. 'It's what they do.'

'Oh, of course,' said Dalia, feeling foolish.

'I'm looking forward to this, really,' said Jonas. 'To use my gift for the betterment of the Imperium? What better way is there for someone blessed with my talent to serve the Emperor? I'll know everything soon, and I'll be part of something that helps humanity achieve its destiny. I know that sounds a bit grand, but it's what we're doing here, isn't it?'

Dalia smiled, relieved beyond words that they were not pressing some unwilling victim into the service of Adept Zeth's grand dream. 'Yes, Jonas,' she said. 'That's exactly what we're doing here.'

'All engines form on Victorix Magna,' ordered Princeps Indias Cavalerio, nodding towards his steersman. 'Keep us level, Lacus.'

'Yes, my princeps,' said Lacus, expertly walking the god-machine through the treacherous straits surrounding the heavily cratered northern reaches of the Ulysses Patera.

'And keep the auspex returns frequent, Palus, the ground here is weak.'

'Yes, my princeps,' came the response from the sensori blister atop the Warlord's crew compartment. The tone of his sensori's voice did not escape Cavalerio, and he knew he was being overcautious, needlessly telling the crew their jobs.

Victorix Magna was an old machine, patched, repaired and refitted a thousand times in her long life of battle.

Her fiery heart was proud, but it was old like his, and Cavalerio wondered how many more marches they would take together.

In truth, the Victorix should still be in the care of the Legio artificers, but since the attack on Adept Maximal's reactor, Legio Tempestus could ill-afford to take chances with the remaining reactors clustered on the slopes of the crater or positioned along the canyons of the Ulysses Fossae.

Without those reactors, it would become increasingly difficult to keep the engines of his beloved Legio operational. Whoever had struck at Maximal had done so with great precision, destroying the reactor that provided the most power to the Tempestus fortress within Ascraeus Mons.

Cavalerio reclined in a contoured couch, his arms and skull sheathed in cables and haptic implants that burrowed beneath his skin like silver worms. This arrangement of a physical connection was fast becoming obsolete, a means of command seen as archaic by some princeps of Mars. Many were already embracing full body immersion in an amniotic tank that allowed information to flow like liquid through a virtual world, but Cavalerio much preferred an actual connection with the engine he commanded.

He knew the gradual atrophy of his body meant that he would soon have no choice but to accept emplacement within such a tank, for he could not endure the pain and stress, both mental and physical, of too many more separations.

That day was not yet here, and Cavalerio pushed the thought from his mind as he concentrated on the mission at hand.

Linked with the Manifold, Cavalerio saw the world around him as though the mighty structure of Victorix Magna were his own flesh and blood. The barren, cratered landscape of Mars stretched out all around him, the pale, ashen wastelands of the pallidus to the southwest and the tumbled rockfaces of the twin craters upon which Maximal's forge hunched like a collection of blistered towers.

Ahead, the tumbled, haphazard sprawl of the Gigas Sulci sub-hives filled the landscape, a wretched, sweltering collection of towers, habs and shanties that housed the millions of workers who toiled in the Fabricator General's manufactorum upon the towering, lightning-wracked slopes of Olympus Mons.

For days Kelbor-Hal's domain had been wreathed in seething thunderheads, the slopes and forges hammered by crackling bolts of purple lightning. Cavalerio didn't know what manner of experimental work the Fabricator General had going on, but it was creating some lousy atmospherics and interfering with vox-traffic for thousands of kilometres in all directions.

Every channel was alive with scrappy blurts of code that sounded like a chorus of urgent voices crowded into a single frequency. Cavalerio had been forced to mute the volume on the vox, the chattering nonsense code giving him a splitting headache.

Cavalerio put the Fabricator General from his mind and cast his augmented gaze far to the south, where thick clouds from the refinery fields of the Daedalia Planum smothered the landscape, smudging the horizon in permanent crepuscular gloom.

The three cobalt blue engines in Cavalerio's battle group marched at a steady pace along the borders between the territory of the Fabricator General and that of Ipluvien Maximal, striding like three great giants of legend.

On Cavalerio's left was the stately Warlord, Tharsis Hastatus, commanded by his comrade-in-arms, Princeps Suzak. Hastatus was a killing engine and Suzak a man who could be depended upon to deliver a lethal strike when it was needed most.

To his right, the Reaver Arcadia Fortis marched with eager steps, pulling slightly ahead of the main group. Its princeps, Ian Mordant, was a fiery-hearted hunter, a warrior recently promoted from a Warhound princepture who hadn't yet shed his preference for lone wolf operations.

'Close it up, Mordant,' said Cavalerio. 'My sensori tells me the ground here is soft and that some of the sand has shifted over the chasms. I don't want to have to call out a bulk lifter crew to lift your engine off its arse.'

'Understood,' came the terse reply, screeches and howls of interference scratching over Mordant's voice. Mordant was still getting used to the quirks of his new command, he and his engine still gauging the measure of the other, and his responses were typically brusque. Cavalerio only tolerated such behaviour because Mordant was one of his best warriors, with a kill tally only exceeded by his own.

'Still thinks he's a Warhound driver, eh?' said Kuyper, the Magna's moderati.

'Indeed,' agreed Cavalerio. 'The Arcadia will soon cure him of that, she's a stern mistress that's for sure. Any word from Basek?'

'Nothing yet, my princeps,' said Kuyper, consulting the vox-log.

'Sensori, do you have a fix on Vulpus Rex?'

'I think so, my princeps,' answered Palus, 'but these damned atmospherics are making it hard to keep a fix on their return. And our old girl's vision's not what it used to be.'

'That's not good enough, Palus,' cautioned Cavalerio. 'Find her. Now.'

'Yes, my princeps,' answered Palus.

Cavalerio gave his sensori a few moments before asking, 'Do you have her now?'

'She's further south,' answered Palus with a measure of relief, 'skulking around the edge of the Gigas sub-hives at the end of the Barium Highway.'

'Good ambush site,' noted Kuyper. 'If anything's going to come up on us, it'll be from there.'

'And they'll find Basek waiting for them,' added Lacus the steersman with relish.

Cavalerio nodded. Princeps Basek commanded Vulpus Rex, the finest Warhound Titan of Legio Tempestus, a fleet killer of engines far larger than its hunched feral size would suggest.

Pulling up the schematics of the surrounding landscape from the Manifold and meshing them with the topographical view afforded him through the Titan's senses, Cavalerio saw that Kuyper's assessment was correct. Only the Barium Highway was wide enough to allow an engine to pass without demolishing half the dwellings.

The confused tangles of glowing outlines that depicted the edges of the sub-hives were, however, outdated and likely to be inaccurate, so it never paid to be complacent where the safety of an engine was concerned. So much was built or demolished that most maps of the sub-hives were rendered obsolete on a daily basis.

'Bring us about on a heading of two-two-five,' ordered Cavalerio, feeling his muscles twitch as the mighty form of Victorix Magna swung about and began a stately march along the edge of Maximal's domain. 'Magos Argyre, what's our reactor status?'

'Assessment: borderline,' said Argyre, the Titan's enginseer, who stood immobile in his rear-mounted compartment behind the princeps's dais. 'We should not have marched, Princeps Cavalerio. The reactor's spirit is troubled and it is dangerous to walk without having recited the full litany of calming prayers to soothe its troubled heart.'

'So noted, Magos,' said Cavalerio. 'Bring us to slow march speed.'

'Slow march speed,' repeated Argyre.

Cavalerio monitored their surroundings through the depths of the Manifold, drinking in data from pressure sensors, atmospheric samplers, infrared panels and microwave receptors. His understanding of the world around him was unparalleled, his awareness unmatched by any other entity on the plains of Mars.

He tried to keep his attention focused on the ground before him, for the landscape around Maximal's forge was treacherous, but he found his attention continually drawn to the ugly, bruised skies above Olympus Mons.

'What are you up to, Kelbor-Hal?' he muttered.

'My princeps?' asked Kuyper.

'Hmmm? Oh, nothing, I was just wondering out loud,' replied Cavalerio.

Kuyper had caught his interest in Olympus Mons, their communal link to the Manifold allowing no secrets to exist between them.

'It's the Grand Mountain, isn't it?' asked Kuyper, using the Titan drivers' old name for Olympus Mons. The moderati of Victorix Magna twisted in the reclined couch at the Warlord's chin mount to face Cavalerio. 'She frets about something.'

'The Grand Mountain,' agreed Cavalerio. 'She speaks with the voice of Mars and something troubles her.'

'My princeps!' called Sensori Palus. 'Vox contact from Ascraeus Mons. Princeps Sharaq urgently requests to speak with you.'

'On the Manifold,' ordered Cavalerio.

A ghostly hash of green light swam into focus before the reclining princeps, a holographic image of Princeps Sharaq standing in the Chamber of the First. The image jittered like a jammed signal, the words fading in and out as though the code was somehow corrupt.

'What is it, Sharaq?' demanded Cavalerio. 'We are on-mission.'

'I know, Stormlord, but you must return to Ascraeus Mons immediately.'

'Return? Why?'

Sharaq's answer was blotted out by a squealing blurt of code like an animalistic bellow of rage, his image distorting as if in the grip of a rippling heat haze.

'…Mortis. They march!'

'What? Repeat last,' snapped Cavalerio.

Sharaq's image suddenly sharpened, and Cavalerio heard the next words as clearly as if his fellow princeps had been standing before him.

'Legio Mortis,' repeated Sharaq. 'Their engines walk. And they are heading towards Ascraeus Mons.'

Dalia stared in fascination at Ipluvien Maximal, wondering how much of him was mechanical and how much was human. From the little she could see of his body beneath the coolant robes he wore to preserve the integrity of the machine parts of his body, the answer was not much. There was precious little left of the magos that spoke of their shared racial kinship.

'You have never seen an adept of the Mechanicum like me?' asked Maximal.

'No,' said Dalia. 'Most of the ones I've seen still look human. You sound human, but you don't look it.'

Maximal turned to Adept Zeth and blurted a crackling burst of code, the viewscreens attached to his host of mechadendrites flashing with his amusement.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' said Dalia. 'I didn't mean to speak out of turn, I was just curious.'

The robed magos turned back to her. 'You understand binaric code? Without modifications?'

'I've picked it up,' said Dalia, embarrassed at the scrutiny.

Maximal nodded his oblong, helmeted head, the whirring lenses adjusting to better view Dalia. 'You were right, Zeth, she is quite remarkable. Perhaps this project of yours might actually bear fruit after all.'

Dalia looked past the hulking form of Maximal to the wide window that looked out into the domed chamber where Jonas Milus was strapped to the theta-wave enhancer, beneath the sightless eyes of the thousands of psykers encased in the coffers of the dome.

'It will work, I'm sure of it,' whispered Dalia.

'Let us hope so, young Dalia,' said Maximal. 'A great deal depends upon it.'

'You have a lovely voice,' said Dalia. 'It's rich, like a well-spoken man of the Romanii. Why would you bother with a voice like that when you look like you do?'

'We all have our foibles, Dalia,' explained Maximal. 'This voice belonged to a great singer of operatic verse and the sounds remind me of all that is good in mankind.'

Dalia didn't know what to say to that, so returned her attention to the view beyond the armoured glass that was all that separated the control room from what was about to happen.

An army of calculus-logi attended to a bewildering bank of cogitators and logic engines that controlled aspects of the Akashic reader she had not known about. Many of the symbols on the panels were unknown to her or used words she didn't know. The control room was a thrumming box of tension and activity, the sense of something great and portentous heavy on everyone's features.

Even the servitors looked tense, though Dalia told herself that it was just her imagination.

'When does it start?' asked Dalia, turning to her colleagues.

Caxton and Severine shrugged and even Mellicin had no answer.

'It starts now, Dalia,' said Adept Zeth appearing at her side and placing a bronze gauntlet on her shoulder. 'All of this is down to you.'

'Then let's just hope it works,' said Dalia, looking at the distant, serene features of Jonas Milus.

'Terran horizon clear,' said an automated voice. 'Astronomican light readings approaching test window parameters. Alignment on track.'

'Removing pentobarbital wards from psychic foci,' said the toneless voice of a calculus-logi. 'Increasing aperture of pineal antenna.'

'Magma generators diverting power to collectors.'

'What do all those things mean?' asked Dalia.

'You remember I told you that it takes a great deal of energy to breach the walls separating us from the aether?' said Zeth.

'Yes.'

'Well, it takes a form and amount of energy that cannot be generated here on Mars.'

'What kind of energy?'

'Psychic energy,' said Zeth, 'in quantities that can only be harvested from one source, the Astronomican.'

'The Emperor's warp beacon? The one that guides starships?'

'The very same,' said Zeth, pointing towards the metallic disc at the dome's apex, from which golden spears of energy were arcing. 'Only the Astronomican has the required psychic energy that will allow the Akashic reader to access the sum of all knowledge we seek. We will divert a fraction of its power into the chamber to empower the psykers and open the gates to the aether.'

'Won't it disrupt the Astronomican if we use its power?' asked Dalia.

Zeth looked over at Maximal, a moment's hesitation giving Dalia the answer she sought.

'It will,' admitted Zeth, 'but only for a short span of time.'

Dalia stepped towards the consoles that operated the Akashic reader, assimilating what Zeth had just told her into her understanding of what was being said and what the words carved into the wooden panels meant.

She had no real idea of how powerful the Astronomican was, but understood that even a fraction of its energy would be greater than anything she could imagine. She looked into the chamber at the waking psykers and knew with sudden, awful, clarity that she had overlooked something.

'How are you going to divert the Astronomican's power?' she asked.

'Mars will be in alignment with Terra soon and we will pass through the radiance of the psychic beacon. The pineal antennae will collect the energy and divert it to the psykers.'

'Is that how you've always done it?' asked Dalia urgently.

Adept Zeth shook her head. 'No. This will be the first time we have passed through the Astronomican.'

'Oh no,' whispered Dalia. 'The calculations are wrong. They're all wrong!'

'Wrong, what are you talking about?' demanded Adept Maximal.

'The energy readings,' said Dalia. 'I understand now… the different readings. Fluctuating maximums and minimums. Apogee and perigee… That's why the numbers were different. We assumed a baseline average, but that's not what we're going to get now.'

'Dalia, explain yourself,' said Zeth. 'Talk me through your concerns.'

'The raw data you gave us to work with…' said Dalia. 'I based the upper levels of assumed energy transference on the psychic strengths you've used so far, but this time the energy levels will be hundreds… thousands of times greater than before. The reader used fragments of reflected and refracted psychic bleed… scraps and trickles of psychic energy, but this is going to be a raging torrent!'

'Psychic confluence in five, four…'

'Adept Zeth,' said Dalia, tearing her eyes from Jonas Milus and spinning to face the Mistress of the Magma City. 'We have to stop this. It's going to be too much!'

'Don't be ridiculous,' said Zeth. 'We cannot stop it.'

'You have to!' begged Dalia. 'Please! It's only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.'

'Three, two, one…' continued the countdown.

'No… Oh, Throne, no!' cried Dalia, turning back to the domed chamber.

Blinding light, brighter than a million suns, flooded the chamber of the Akashic reader as the full might of the Astronomican poured its energies through the coffers and into the blind psykers.

Shouts of alarm and warning klaxons blared almost immediately.

And over it all, Dalia could hear the agonised screaming of Jonas Milus.

The desolate uplands between the volcanoes of the Tharsis Montes were bare of structures or habitation. Any landscape habitually trodden by the god engines of the Legios was crushed flat by the unimaginable weight of the titanic war machines. The only artificial creations were those placed there by Legio servitors to act as target practice.

The land between Ascraeus Mons and Pavonis Mons was rugged and inhospitable, an area of demarcation between two warrior orders who shared a region of Mars but little else. A few of the nomadic vassal tribes that plied the ashen wastelands between the great forges of the adepts had tried to found settlements there, but even they were forced to concede that living in the shadow of the Titan fortresses was untenable.

The great golden gateway of the Legio Tempestus fortress at the end of the Ascraeus Chasmata stood open, and three titanic engines, resplendent in their cobalt blue armour plates, marched out. Kill totems and trailing honour banners billowed on their weapons and from enormous masts fitted to their carapaces.

Metallus Cebrenia, the engine of Princeps Sharaq, led them out, followed by its smaller siblings, the Warhounds Raptoria and Astrus Lux. All three machines were fully armed and ready to fight, their gun-servitors and auto-loaders cycled up to battle readiness. A host of bestial, armoured Skitarii divisions swarmed at the base of the canyon, but Sharaq knew that they would be of little use in any engine fight that might develop.

Only a fraction of the Tempestus Skitarii remained on Mars, but Aeschman, the commander of the Martian divisions, had demanded the right to march out with the engines, and Sharaq wasn't about to deny the towering brute the chance to lead his augmented warriors.

To march out with such a force was almost unheard of on Mars, but with tensions running high in the Tharsis region, Princeps Sharaq was taking no chances with the security of the Legio's fortress.

With Princeps Senioris Cavalerio protecting the reactors of Ipluvien Maximal, Sharaq was next in the chain of command and the security of Ascraeus Mons was his responsibility.

He just wished he had more engines to secure it with.

Two Warhounds and a Reaver fresh from refit was no force to protect an entire base, not when the engines of Mortis were walking.

Cavalerio's battle group was on its way back, but a ferocious dust storm had blown out of the west from the slopes of the Great Mountain to confound the auspex, so, for all intents and purposes, Sharaq was on his own.

Did Mortis have violence in mind? Sharaq didn't know and just hoped this was another of Camulos's posturing walks to demonstrate his Legio's favour on Mars.

'Dolun?' asked Sharaq. 'Where are they?' He didn't need to clarify who he meant.

'Getting engine returns and heat blooms from four or five engines, my princeps,' said his sensori, feeding the information to Sharaq through the Manifold. The view through the cabin windows was a swirling, seething mass of orange and brown dust particles, the smooth-finished rock of the canyon sides barely visible in the gloom.

Sharaq needed no visual cues to command the Metallus Cebrenia, for he was navigating and driving his engine via the sensorium of the Manifold, a much more reliable source of information than the poor sense of his eyes.

'I estimate sixty kilometres out, closing fast,' said Dolun. 'Possible four engines, striding speed or better.'

'Throne, they're big,' hissed Moderati Bannan.

'Warlords,' said Sharaq. 'Three of them. And maybe a Reaver.'

'Probably,' noted Bannan. 'But that heat bloom in the centre… it's too big for one engine. Might be another marching in close formation. They could be trying to hide another engine.'

'Dolun?' queried Sharaq. 'What do you make of that assessment?'

'Could be, but the void returns I'm getting don't look like separate tracks. It's hard to tell, the storms blowing in from the west are messing with every piece of surveyor gear I've got.'

'Keep on it,' ordered Sharaq, flexing his fists in their sheaves of steel and wire. A rumbling thunder vibrated along the great pistons and cogs of Metallus Cebrenia's colossal frame as the god-machine sensed his anticipation through the Manifold. Cebrenia was an old machine, a grand dam of the Legio with an enviable honour roll, but she had faltered in her last battle and taken severe damage.

The journey back to Mars for refit and repair had been difficult for both man and machine, and Sharaq could feel the pressure to perform in this engagement.

'Any word from Mortis?' he demanded. 'Any response to our hails?'

'Negative, my princeps,' replied Bannan. 'I'm just getting static. Could be the storm is playing with the vox, but I doubt it.'

'What about the Stormlord? Any word from Princeps Cavalerio?'

'Last transmission we had said they were heading back at flank speed,' said Bannan. 'Nothing since then.'

'Come on, Indias,' whispered Sharaq. 'I can't hold the Chasmata with a Reaver and two Warhounds.'

He returned his attention to the Manifold, trying to make some sense of the squalls and interference that fogged his perceptions of the world around his engine.

The Martian networks had been jammed for days with scrappy, fragmentary code blurts that appeared to have no point of origin, and which ghosted around the system before vanishing just as inexplicably.

'Adept Eskund, reduce reactor power twelve per cent,' ordered Sharaq. 'Bannan, bring us to one third. Hold us at the mouth of the canyon.'

'Yes, my princeps,' said Bannan, easing down on their speed.

Sharaq opened the Manifold to the princeps of the two Warhounds and said, 'Kasim, Lamnos.'

Ghostly images, rippling and unsteady, formed in the air before Sharaq's eyes: Kasim, the swarthy-skinned predator, and Lamnos, the ambusher who killed from the shadows. Both warriors worked well together, Kasim fighting with the aggression of a hunter to flush prey towards the killing fire of his brother-in-arms.

'Princeps Sharaq,' said Kasim, his voice thick with the accent of the hives of Phoenicus Lacus. 'You have hunting orders?'

'Maybe,' said Sharaq. 'Spread out and run a criss-cross search pattern out towards the last fix we had on Mortis. I want to know where those damned engines are.'

'Are we to engage?' asked Lamnos, and Sharaq almost laughed at the eagerness he heard in his fellow princeps voice.

'Your courage is admirable, Lamnos, but if Mortis are coming in the strength I think they are, a pair of Warhounds won't stop them.'

'Then we just let them march on our fortress unopposed?' demanded Kasim.

'We don't know where they're marching yet,' Sharaq reminded his bellicose Warhound drivers. 'They may swing westwards and carry on north to the Olympica Fossae assembly yards. Or they could bear east towards Mondus Occulum. We don't know.'

'They will rue the day if they cross the Tempest Line,' snarled Lamnos.

'Yes, they will,' agreed Sharaq, 'but until they do and are within our engagement zone, you are not to fire unless fired upon. I won't have Camulos saying we started an engine war on Mars thanks to a headstrong Tempest driver. Understood?'

Both princeps grumbled their assent and Sharaq shut down the link between them as the Warhounds loped off into the wind-whipped ash and dust.

Dalia raced from the control room, chased by screaming alarm bells and the blinding light of the Astronomican. Howling cants of binary squealed and the air foamed with torrents of panicked data streams.

Tears spilled down her cheeks as she heard the agonised screaming of Jonas Milus, the sound echoing from the front of her skull to the innermost reaches of her psyche. Dalia had promised herself that he would be safe, that her work would not see him killed in the name of scientific progress.

That promise had been reduced to ashes and she couldn't bear the sound of his screams. She passed into the towering shaft chamber that rose up to the Magma City, seeing that the low archway in the silver wall was now filled with a great bronze gate. She ran towards it, molten light spilling through a circular window in its centre.

'No!' she cried. 'No! He's dying!'

She beat her fists on the metal door, bruising the flesh of her hands and drawing blood where she clawed at the glass with her fingernails. Dalia pressed her face to the window, straining to see anything through the dazzling brightness that filled the chamber and rendered what was happening within invisible.

'Open the door!' screamed Dalia. 'Open the damn door! We have to stop this!'

Dalia rushed to the keypad at the side of the door and began punching in the code required to open it. She had not been made privy to the doorway's code, but had skimmed the access protocols from Zeth's noospheric aura.

Further warning alarms shrilled and a pulsating amber light began to strobe angrily.

She felt a restraining hand on her arm and angrily threw it off.

'You can't go in there!' shouted a voice at her ear: Caxton's.

'I have to!' she wailed. 'He's dying. Oh, Throne we're killing him!'

'It's not your fault,' said Caxton, drawing her arms back from the door before she could punch in the final sequence of digits and turning her away from the light streaming through the window. 'It's not your fault.'

'It is, it is,' sobbed Dalia, burying her face in Caxton's shoulder and holding him tightly, as if the force of her grip could somehow end the horror. 'We need to get in there.'

'You can't,' said Caxton. 'Not yet. You're not soul-bound!'

'I don't care! I need to get in there!'

'No! The psychic energy will kill you if you go through that door.'

'Like it's killing them!' said Dalia. 'I've got to!'

She pushed Caxton away and entered the last digits of the access sequence.

Like a rolling surge tide, the light boiled out from the chamber of the Akashic reader, and Dalia plunged into the roaring blizzard of psychic power.

Princeps Kasim felt the savage glee of Raptoria as he pushed her to flank speed. Like him, Raptoria was glad to be walking beneath the sky, unfettered and armed for war. The between times when she languished in oily ship holds, restrained by scaffolds and manacled to the deck, had been a cage for her warlike heart, a cell for an angry killer that had denied her sublime skills as a hunter.

This was her first walk since returning to Mars for repairs, and Kasim felt the urge to kill in every piston, gear and metal joint of his mount. He looked down at the golden skull and cog medallion that hung around his neck and wished that he could reach up and touch it for luck, but his hands were encased in wire-wound haptic sheaths.

Princeps Cavalerio, the Stormlord himself, had presented Kasim with the medallion, honouring him in front of the Legio as they boarded the ships for Mars after the brutal, hard-fought campaign of the Epsiloid Binary Cluster.

Six engines had been lost and many wounded, including the already battle-scarred Victorix Magna, the towering war machine of the Stormlord.

Cavalerio had brought the badly wounded engines of the Legio back to Mars, leaving the bulk of Tempestus under the command of Princeps Maximus Karania. Months of labour by the Legio artisans had seen the damaged engines repaired and brought back to their former glory.

With the refit works virtually complete the Legio was ready to transfer back to the expedition fleet, to once more extend the rightful domain of the Imperium. Kasim eagerly awaited the Legio's return to the forefront of the fighting, for Mars had changed in the years since Tempestus had led its war machines across its umber plains.

No longer was Mars united in the dream of the Great Crusade. The clan-forges and magi had fallen to petty squabbling and spiteful acts of violence, dragging the red planet into an age of suspicion and mistrust.

Even the warrior orders had changed, forming factions and isolated bands of martial strength to protect what resources they controlled. Mortis had been no exception, extending their control through the guise of protection to many of the smaller forges and more easily pressured warrior orders.

No, the sooner Tempestus could get back to the real work of the galaxy the better.

'Where are they?' he hissed, bringing his Warhound about and angling his course to intersect with that of Astrus Lux. The view from his canopy was mostly obscured by the billowing ash storm, the thick, armoured glass streaked with a dusty residue that was the bane of cogs and gears.

'Twenty kilometres, my princeps,' said Moderati Vorich. 'Signal returns growing in strength, but they keep fading in and out… as if there's some kind of interference pushing out just ahead of them.'

'Keep us steady,' warned Kasim. 'And keep a close eye on the sensoria, they'll probably have Warhound pickets as well.'

'Yes, my princeps.'

Kasim felt the power beneath him, the fiery heart of Raptoria straining at his commands and anxious for the hunt proper to begin.

'Soon,' he whispered.

Kasim was relying on hard implants and the myriad surveyor apparatus fed information to him via the MIU, data flowing directly into his cerebral cortex as streams of neurons.

So far, Raptoria was running only passive scans, the better to hide her presence in the storm. An active scan of the area would reveal more of their surroundings, but would as good as announce their presence to any undiscovered hunters.

In such conditions, a Warhound lived and killed by its stealth - as strange as the concept of such a huge machine being stealthy might appear - and Kasim trusted his instincts to keep Raptoria safe. The interference plaguing the sensoria was troubling, and he could feel Raptoria's unease in the skittishness of her controls.

All his other senses were undimmed. He could feel the nearness of princeps Lamnos's engine, the bite of the dust on Raptoria's hull, and taste the oily, ashen flavour of the wind as it howled around him.

Somewhere out in the dust was the enemy, even if they hadn't been classified as such yet, but Kasim couldn't see them or know how close they were. Such situations were a Titan driver's worst nightmare; that your enemy could be plotting a firing solution without you even knowing he was there.

Kasim knew it was only a matter of time before Mortis and Tempestus drew blood.

The words exchanged between the Stormlord and Camulos at the Council of Tharsis had as good as guaranteed it. Kasim's warrior instinct was to strike the first blow, but he would not disobey a direct order from Princeps Sharaq.

'My princeps!' called Vorich as the ground suddenly shook with a thunderous reverberation. 'Hard returns, dead ahead! Reactor blooms and void signatures!'

'Where in the name of the Machine did they come from?' demanded Kasim. 'Identify!'

'Unknown contact, but it's too big to be a Warhound.'

The vibration of the ground had already told him that this was no Warhound. Too big for a Reaver.

'A Warlord?' responded Kasim, his excitement and fear manifesting in the Warhound's posture as it crouched close to the ground.

'No, my princeps,' said Vorich, staring in horror at the sight emerging from the howling dust clouds.

Kasim felt the chill of its shadow envelop him, and his skin flushed as he saw the enormous engine stride towards them, its every step rocking the very earth with its monstrous tread. A towering fortress of brazen red metal with black and silver etchings moulded on the great bastion towers of its legs, the enormous engine dwarfed the Warhound as a grown man would dwarf a babe in arms.

Arcing battlements crowned its immensity, the colossal, mountainous fortress engine unlike anything Kasim had seen before. He had heard the rumours and looked over the technical specs and blueprints of similar machines, but nothing had prepared him for the awesome spectacle of so gargantuan a war machine in the flesh.

Weapons capable of obliterating cities depended from its wide shoulders and its head was a grinning, horned skull of burnished silver.

'Imperator,' said Kasim.

Princeps Cavalerio scoured the Manifold for information, reading nothing through the barking, squealing hash of scrapcode fouling the airwaves. He could get nothing from Princeps Sharaq and feared the worst. Mortis was on the march, and Cavalerio wondered if Princeps Camulos was about to make good his threat of a coming storm.

His battle group was marching at flank speed towards their fortress and he could feel the ancient heart of Victorix Magna protest at the demands placed upon it. His own heart beat in time with the great machine and he felt a growing numbness spreading through his limbs.

Cavalerio fought against the sensation, willing both his mortal frame and the immortal might of his engine to keep going.

'Do you really think Mortis is about to attack Ascraeus Mons?' asked Moderati Kuyper.

'I don't know,' confessed Cavalerio, their words spoken through the link of the Manifold. 'I believe Camulos wants to drive our Legio from Tharsis, but this seems bold even for him.'

'Then perhaps this is the first strike in a larger war,' suggested Kuyper.

Cavalerio kept his thoughts close, remembering what Camulos had said at the Council of Tharsis.

Sides were being chosen and battle lines drawn all across Mars, and while Cavalerio couldn't bring himself to believe that the Titan orders were about to go to war, this manoeuvre of Mortis seemed deliberately calculated to rouse the ire of Tempestus.

Well, Indias Cavalerio was not about to rise to the bait of this provocation.

'I don't think they will attack,' he said. 'I think they want us to attack them, to fire the first shot so as to justify their retaliation.'

'Our warriors will only fire if they're fired on first,' said Kuyper.

Cavalerio thought of the engine commanders at Ascraeus Mons: Sharaq, Lamnos and Kasim. Sharaq could be trusted to understand the situation, but Lamnos and Kasim?

Their hearts were fiery and warlike, as was expected of Warhound drivers, but where heart and mind were in balance in more experienced warriors, Cavalerio feared what impulsive decisions they might make in the heat of the moment.

'Get me Sharaq's battle group,' he said. 'I need to make sure they know not to fire first.'

'Understood, Stormlord,' said Kuyper, returning his attention to breaking through the interference.

Cavalerio opened the Manifold link to Magos Argyre. 'How long till we reach the Mons?'

'Update: at flank speed, we will be within visual range of Ascraeus Mons in seventeen point four minutes. However, the reactor is running twenty-seven per cent in excess of what I believe it can safely handle at this time.'

'Increase reactor output,' ordered Cavalerio. 'I want us there in less than ten.'

'Warning: to increase reactor output beyond the current rate of—'

'I don't want to hear any excuses!' snapped Cavalerio. 'Just make it happen!'

The Imperator Titan had not come alone.

Two Warlords and a Reaver marched alongside it like the hangers-on of a scholam bully. Kasim could see no sign of a Warhound picket or skitarii escort, but with engines as large as this, what need had they of any skirmish screen?

The ground shook and cracked at its passing, and Kasim could only watch in mute awe as the mightiest war machine he had ever seen swept past him like an uprooted hive on mountainous legs.

'What do we do?' breathed Moderati Vorich.

What indeed? To fight such a monster was suicide, but its path would see it cross the Tempest Line in a little over nine minutes, and then they would have to fight it. They would be as ants against a bull-grox… but even ants could bring down a larger beast with enough numbers.

As his now active surveyors gathered what information they could on the might of the Imperator, Kasim knew that Tempestus had not the guns to defeat such a terrifying opponent.

'We follow it,' said Kasim. 'And we wait.'

'Wait for what?' asked Vorich.

Kasim looked down at his medallion, again wishing he could touch it. 'To see if this is the day we die,' he said.

Dalia screamed as the howling gale of psychic energy enveloped her, feeling it tear at her like a malicious hurricane. She heard screaming voices that clawed at the inner surfaces of her skull and whispers she could not possibly be hearing, but which sounded as clear as though she heard them lying on her bed in the middle of the night.

White light filled the chamber, the walls blurring in a rippling haze thrown off by the roaring column of silver that flared from the dome's apex and speared down towards Jonas Milus upon his throne.

She heard the metallic ring of the doorway closing behind her and spared a brief thought for Caxton and the others. Her robes billowed in the grip of powerful etheric winds, her skin raw and scoured by invisible energies that passed through her skin to the marrow and beyond.

Billowing ghosts of light swarmed the chamber, fleeting unnatural forms that defied description and which lingered uncomfortably in the darkest reaches of her imagination. Clouds of feelings filled the chamber: thunderheads of anger, zephyrs of regret, hailstorms of longing, hurricanes of love and betrayal.

Emotions and meaning surrounded her, though how such concepts could be given physical, visible form was a mystery to her. Dalia took a step into the chamber, feeling her will erode in the face of the primal energies that surrounded her and infused her at the same time.

'Jonas!' she yelled, the words fleeing her mouth in a gush of red. At first she feared it was blood, but the colour in the air vanished almost as soon as it had appeared. The noise filling the chamber was incredible, like the death scream of an entire race or the birth pangs of another.

All emotion and knowledge was here, and Dalia realised that this was the aether; this was the realm beyond the one her senses could consciously perceive. This was the source of all knowledge and the source of the greatest danger imaginable.

This was what she had allowed Jonas Milus to be exposed to.

The thought galvanised her steps, and she forced her way through the maelstrom of light and colour, feeling the energies unleashed by the psykers in the coffered ceiling bleed off as they began to die. She could feel their lives ending, dissipating into the cacophony of light and noise. She wept with sympathetic pain, feeling each death as a splinter of needle-sharp agony in her mind.

Dalia shielded her eyes as she drew closer to the dais, seeing Jonas Milus convulsing upon the throne, illuminated by the blinding light of the Astronomican. His head jerked spasmodically from side to side, his mouth a blur of motion as he screamed and yammered streams of words too fast to be understood.

She pushed her way up the steps towards him, dropping to her knees to better fight against the gales of energy and howling ghosts that swarmed the dais.

'Jonas!' she called, reaching out to him.

She couldn't reach him and crawled, inch by inch, towards him. His screaming was undimmed, the words flooding from him so fast in an ululating howl of pain. Fire blazed in his eyes, crackling with ancient power, the power of something far greater than anything mankind had ever known.

At last Dalia reached the top of the dais and saw that the storm of psychic energy swirled around the throne, yet never touched it, as though some invisible, antithetical barrier was holding it back.

The throne shone as though illuminated from within by some vast elementally powerful force. Though she and her compatriots had struggled so hard to create it, she now wished they had failed utterly.

She wished to be rid of her gift and the consequences of what it had done.

Even as she formed the thought, her limbs jerked and she rose to her feet in the manner of a marionette lifted by its puppeteer. Dalia cried out as her limbs obeyed the unknown imperatives manipulating her body and she stared into the face of Jonas Milus.

The fire that burned in his eyes spilled outwards to engulf his entire body, pouring over him like blazing mercury. Her screams matched his, and the restraints that had bound him to the throne fell away, unmade by the silver fire that crawled over his flesh like a living thing.

The empath rose from his throne, a living being of illuminated silver with the light of unknown suns burning in his eyes. Dalia could not meet his gaze, fearful that the power there would consume her were she to stare into it for too long. Beneath the inner luminescence that filled his body, she could see his flesh disintegrating like ice before a flame.

'I have seen it!' he hissed, his voice sounding as though echoing from somewhere impossibly distant and deep. 'All knowledge.'

'Oh Jonas, I'm sorry.'

'Sorry? No, Dalia, I won't have your pity,' said Jonas, fire writhing in his mouth as he spoke, his voice growing fainter with every word. 'I have seen the truth and I am free. I know it all, the Emperor slaying the Dragon of Mars… the grand lie of the red planet and the truth that will shake the galaxy, all forgotten by man in the darkness of the labyrinth of night.'

Jonas Milus stepped towards Dalia, and the psychic winds were pushed away from her as though by his very presence. As he drew closer to her, Dalia heard the whine of great machinery powering down and the thump of closing relays as power to the Akashic reader was finally shut off.

The light of the Astronomican still filled the chamber, and the winds of psychic energy still roared and seethed at its edges, but their power was diminishing. The mundane features of the space began returning, the marble floor, the sensation of mass and solidity, the heat of the air and the smell of burned flesh.

'Quickly! Look at me, Dalia,' said Jonas with desperate urgency. 'Look at me and know your destiny.'

She forced her head up and stared into the face of Jonas Milus as the light in his eyes was extinguished and the last of his human flesh faded away to oblivion.

The connection lasted the briefest fraction of a second, but that was enough.

Dalia screamed until she had no more breath, and took refuge from horrors that should never be borne by mortal brains in the black sleep of unconsciousness.

Princeps Sharaq followed the inbound tracks on the Manifold. The Imperator Titan was closing fast, surface scans of its identity markers revealing its name to be Aquila Ignis, an engine constructed in the Daedalia forge yards far to the south of Tharsis.

Its princeps, if such a vast machine could be commanded by just one man, was making no effort to conceal its power, and Sharaq fed the flow of data being collected on the terrible engine into the gunbox recorders of his war machine.

If the time ever came when they had to fight this engine, it would pay to be prepared.

With the unmasking of the Imperator, the howling binary interference had lifted, the storms that had whipped the dust into the air with such force dissipating as though they had never existed.

The vox crackled as the engines of Tempestus restored communications, each one filling the airwaves with excited chatter at the incredible sight marching towards Ascraeus Mons. Raptoria and Astrus Lux shadowed the Imperator, keeping a safe distance from it and its escorting Warlords.

'Do you have firing solutions to that engine?' asked Sharaq.

'Yes, my princeps,' said Bannan hesitantly. 'But if we open fire, it'll vaporise us in an instant. We can't fight something that big.'

The Imperator blotted out everything around it, a walking mountain that impossibly moved closer with thunderous footsteps. Sharaq wished the rest of his Legio were here alongside him.

To be standing directly in the path of such a titanic creation, a fearsome miracle of construction and innovation, was a prospect no man should have to face alone. Raptoria and Astrus Lux would fight alongside him, and the Skitarii weapons platforms would add their weight of fire, but they would be of little real use when the mighty engines started shooting.

For all intents and purposes, Sharaq was alone… his greatest fear as a princeps.

With Princeps Cavalerio's battle group they would at least have a chance of wounding the beast, and might even best it, but without them…

'Time to the Tempest Line?' asked Sharaq, sweating profusely despite the cool air in the carapace cockpit.

'Three minutes, my princeps,' said Dolun.

'Come on, turn away, damn you, turn,' hissed Bannan, and Sharaq echoed his sentiment as the seconds ticked by with the inexorably slow slide of thick engine oil.

Then the Manifold crackled and the blessed voice of the Stormlord came over the vox.

'Engines of the Legio Mortis,' said Princeps Cavalerio, his voice stentorian and unequivocal. 'You are on course to cross the Tempest Line, whereupon you will be in breach of the Tharsis non-aggression pact as signed by Princeps Acheron of Legio Mortis and Princeps Bakka of Legio Tempestus at the First Council of Cydonia. Turn back now or you may be fired upon.'

Sharaq watched the Manifold as Cavalerio's engines marched up through the western pallidus, billowing clouds of dust swirling in their wakes. To have reached Ascraeus Mons in such time must have torn the hearts from their reactors, but they were here and that was what mattered.

'Engines of Legio Mortis respond immediately!' demanded Cavalerio, and Sharaq could hear the strain in the Stormlord's voice. He checked the Manifold, getting elevated biometric and reactor readings from the Victorix Magna.

The thunderous form of the Imperator did not slow and Sharaq saw that it was moments from crossing the Tempest Line, whereupon it would be in the territory of Legio Tempestus. His mouth was dry and he took a sip from the hydration straw at his cheek.

'Legio Mortis, respond!' demanded Cavalerio, and Sharaq's heart swelled with pride as the stately form of Victorix Magna marched to stand alongside Metallus Cebrenia, firm in the path of the colossal Imperator.

'Fifteen seconds to the Tempest Line,' warned Moderati Bannan.

Tharsis Hastatus, Arcadia Fortis and Vulpus Rex took position alongside Cavalerio's engine, and the entire strength of Legio Tempestus on Mars stood before the mightiest war engines of Legio Mortis.

'This is your final warning. Mortis!' bellowed Cavalerio.

Dreadful terror settled in Sharaq's gut as Moderati Bannan said, 'Tempest Line breached, my princeps.'