Mechanicum

2.01

The Tempest Line had been breached. The sovereign territory of one of the most honourable Legios of Mars had been violated. Armed engines had blatantly marched from their fortress and come with warlike intent to another. Despite the evidence before him, Princeps Cavalerio still could not accept that Mortis wanted to exchange fire.

Why would they risk such a thing? Supporting Horus Lupercal and engaging in provocation was one thing, but daring another Legio to fire upon your engines made no sense unless there was a darker, more far-reaching scheme at work.

If battle were joined here, little would survive, and even with the Imperator, Mortis would not walk away unscathed.

Cavalerio had always suspected that Camulos was a man unsuited for command, and this confrontation seemed only to confirm his suspicions. It was madness, and Cavalerio did not want to be sucked into that madness. The factions of the Mechanicum might make war on one another, but the Titan Legions were supposed to be above such things, to hold the ideals of a united Mars and Terra above all things, even their own differences.

'My princeps,' said Moderati Kuyper. 'The Tempest Line.'

'I know,' said Cavalerio. 'Should we open fire?'

'You have a solution?'

'At this range we don't need one,' Kuyper assured him. 'That monster's so large we won't miss.'

Cavalerio nodded, sweat streaming from his brow, and his mouth dry. His heart was beating in brutal syncopation with the fiery heart of Victorix Magna, the straining power of a supernova at the engine's core burning hotter and faster than it was ever designed to. He could hear Magos Argyre's desperate supplications to the reactor's spirit and felt the anguish of the mighty engine in the numbness spreading through his limbs.

The image of the Imperator filled his senses, both through the viewscreen and through the Manifold. Data scrolled like liquid light through his mind, and he drank in the colossal feats of engineering that had gone into its construction and the utter lethality of its existence.

Its limbs were death incarnate, the grinning skull-face an abominable harbinger of destruction. The bristling weapon towers and bastions were a martial city-fortress carried on the back of an ancient god, though this burden was borne willingly and not as a punishment.

To fight such a thing would be the greatest achievement of any princeps, but it would probably also be his last.

The monster took another step, taking with it any chance that this crossing of the Tempest Line was accidental.

'Princeps Sharaq requests instructions,' called out Kuyper. 'Arcadia Fortis requests permission to fire.'

'Vulpus Rex and Astrus Lux moving into flank fire positions,' noted Palus.

'Tell them to hold positions, damn them!' shouted Cavalerio, his pulse racing like the roaring discharge of a gatling cannon. 'No one opens fire unless I give the order. Make sure that last part is especially clear, Kuyper.'

'Yes, my princeps.'

Cavalerio had the sensation of events sliding beyond his control, and he fought for breath as the fire from his loyal engine's heart poured through the virtual marrow of his body like blood from a ruptured artery.

His vision blurred, the edges of the Manifold swimming like a badly-tuned picter.

Victorix Magna was hurting, hurting badly, and Cavalerio knew he had to end this ugly confrontation soon.

But how to do that without beginning a firefight that would destroy them all…

Raptoria strained at the edges of Princeps Kasim's control, a feral, bestial thing that demanded blood and poured violent thoughts into his consciousness. Its murderous heart had tasted the enemy's presence and felt the heat of its metal skin. It wanted to kill.

Kasim looked down at the gold cog medallion he wore and focused his mind on the discipline encoded into his thoughts by the Legio Magi before beginning this walk. Clogged data from previous engagements were washed from the peripherals grafted to the frontal lobes of each crewman's brain to ensure each engagement was begun without the mental baggage of the last, but the hungry taste of battle was impossible to wash away completely.

No engine ever really forgot the hot, metallic flavour of war.

Kasim could feel his steersman's efforts to keep the aggression from Raptoria's movements and could hear the engine's hunger for battle in the thudding, roaring drumbeat of her reactor.

Raptoria wanted to fight and, damn it, so did he.

Princeps Cavalerio was holding his fire and so too must they, but it was galling to see the engines of Mortis so brazenly insulting the honour of Tempestus. To allow this art of defiance to go unpunished was a bitter pill to swallow, and he could already feel Raptoria's ire building within his skull with the malicious promise of future pain to come.

'Power up weapons,' he ordered in an effort to assuage the engine's bloodlust. 'Disengage safeties and surrender all firing authorities to me.'

By assuming all firing authorities, he was making sure that the feral heart of Raptoria didn't overwhelm the low-grade brain coding of the emplaced gun-servitors and open fire herself.

Kasim didn't want his engine to act without his control, but if a shooting war started, he was going to be ready to prosecute it to the best of his ability.

'Why isn't the Stormlord opening fire?' wondered Moderati Vorich.

'Are you in a hurry to die?' asked Kasim. 'Because that's what will happen if we let this get out of hand.'

Despite his rebuke, Kasim was wondering the same thing. Mortis had clearly breached the Tempest Line, and Cavalerio was quite within his rights to fire. As much as his heart was spoiling for a fight, Kasim knew that the odds against victory were high.

Staring into the Manifold, Kasim saw the heroic form of the Victorix Magna standing firm before the monstrous, towering might of the Imperator. Beside her stood Arcadia Fortis and Metallus Cebrenia, all three engines dwarfed by the enemy engine.

'What are you planning, Stormlord?' whispered Kasim.

The Imperator loomed on the Manifold, a glowering god of war that could destroy them all. A few more steps and it would be right on top of them.

In the cabin cockpit of Metallus Cebrenia, Princeps Sharaq was wondering the same thing as Kasim. Moderati Bannan counted the ever-increasing distance Aquila Ignis was striding into the territory of Legio Tempestus.

Increasing the angle of his view through the Manifold, Sharaq saw Victorix Magna standing proud beside him, venting hot exhaust gases and sweating lubricant from its overflows. Even without the spiking data readings, he could tell that the venerable engine was suffering.

'Come on, Indias,' he whispered. 'Hold her together a little longer.'

He transferred his view outwards, seeing the agile, snapping forms of Vulpus Rex, Astrus Lux and Raptoria darting around the edges and rear of the approaching Imperator like pack wolves hunting a stag. Ever bellicose, their weapons were powered and ready to fire.

The ground shook and Sharaq could feel the tremor through every joint of his engine's structure. Inertial dampers could compensate for most fluctuations in a Titan's surrounding environment, but the mighty tread of such a colossal enemy was beyond its power to completely dissipate.

He looked down at the far away ground, feeling a stab of pity for the massed ranks of skitarii gathered around his engine's splayed feet. To face a beast like the Imperator from a Warlord's cockpit was a terrifying enough prospect, but to stand naked before it without the protection of voids and armour…

That was courage indeed.

'Range to target?' asked Sharaq, fighting to keep his tone even.

The question was unnecessary. He could already see that the Imperator was less than three hundred metres away through the Manifold, point-blank range by any normal measure of things, but insanely close in this situation. He could already hear the squeal and rasp of the voids as their fields warbled with the proximity.

'Two hundred and fifty metres, my princeps,' said Bannan.

He spared a glance to his left.

Victorix Magna stood, implacable and immovable, before the marching Imperator, and Sharaq loved the Stormlord for his resolve as much as he was frustrated by his inaction. The tension within the cockpit compartment of Metallus Cebrenia was unbearable.

Then a harsh, deafening squall shrilled across the vox frequencies, a filthy blurt of continuous, corrupted code noise that sounded like throaty laughter. Sharaq flinched and his sensori screamed as the wailing shriek tore at their hearing.

'What in the name of the Omnissiah is that?' yelled Bannan, snatching the vox-set from his head.

Sharaq killed the audio as the cackling laughter code burbled over the vox and the booming warhorns of the Mortis engines echoed from the towering cliffs of Ascraeus Mons.

The Imperator lowered its weapon arms, every horn, bell and augmitter upon its colossal spires and bastions blaring in disdain. The noise was unimaginably loud, broadcast across every audible wavefront and code frequency.

Debased and dirty codelines conveyed vile algorithms that Sharaq felt worming their way into his peripherals like viral code, and his aegis protocols fought to prevent them from reaching the deep sub-systems of Metallus Cebrenia.

'Princeps!' shouted Bannan. 'Enemy course change detected.'

Sharaq gasped, his mind awhirl as his implants defended his neural paths from infection by the scrappy code fragments carried on the war-scream of the Imperator. He forced his mind through the clotted data packets of black, oozing information that blurred his vision and saw that Bannan was right.

The Imperator was changing course, its stride swinging to the east.

Like a great ocean liner travelling at speed, the course of such a vast machine did not change swiftly and its new heading would barely carry it past the south-eastern skirts of Ascraeus Mons.

'Dolun? Intercept plot,' hissed Sharaq, the beginnings of a blistering headache building behind his eyes. 'Where's it going?'

His sensori didn't answer, and Sharaq twisted his head to see Dolun lying supine on his reclined couch. The man's eyes rolled back into his skull and foaming spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Sharaq meshed his senses briefly with Dolun's station, feeling the hash of viral code replicating like a plague within his I/O ports, ready to spill out into the guts of the war engine.

With a thought, Sharaq cut the link between Dolun's interfaces and the rest of the Titan, but even as he did so, he could feel the scrapcode trying to find another way in.

'Moderati Bannan!' shouted Sharaq. 'Disengage Sensori Dolun from his station. Now!'

Bannan looked over at Dolun, who was convulsing as his corrupted cybernetic enhancements began fitting with the power of a grand mal seizure. Bannan disengaged his hard plugs as quickly as he dared and lurched across the sensori station, unsteady on his feet after so brutal a separation from the MIU.

Sharaq turned his attention from the compromised sensori officer and followed his own track on the enemy engines. An overlaid map of the Tharsis Montes swam into view, grainy and washed with fragments of faulty code. A red line extended from their current position, swinging around to the north-east and extending towards the port facilities of Tharsis Tholus, the primary embarkation point of Astartes supplies from the Fabricator Locum's Mondus Occulum forge.

Sharaq dismissed the map as the shriek of voids filled the cockpit with a warbling, squealing howl of feedback. Like a million nails down a blackboard, titanic energies pushed against one another, scraping their invisible power together and sending flaring, whooping coils of colourful lightning discharge into the air.

'Sensori disconnected,' called Bannan, and Sharaq looked round to see Dolun jerking and twitching on the deck, lubricant and jellied brain matter leaking from his cranial plugs.

'Good work, Bannan,' said Sharaq. 'Leave him and get back on station.'

Sharaq returned his attention to the Manifold, watching in ashamed relief as the might of the Imperator swung yet further away and the spine-shearing sound of void interference abated.

'All Tempestus engines,' he said, forcing a channel through the howling static that still laced the airwaves. 'Ease weapons, I repeat, ease weapons. Mortis are turning away! Acknowledge!'

One by one, the affirmations of the Tempestus engines appeared on the Manifold, and Sharaq let out a shuddering breath as he realised how close they had come to igniting a shooting war on the surface of Mars.

The Imperator's escort of Warlords moved with it and the war machines of Legio Mortis began tramping away, each step carrying them further from the domain of Tempestus.

Mortis was leaving, but Sharaq wanted to be sure they weren't about to turn back for another provocative pass.

'Raptoria, Vulpus Rex, follow Mortis and make sure they keep on their way,' he ordered, wondering why the Stormlord was not issuing the order himself. 'Keep a safe distance back, but make sure they go.'

The two Warhounds set off without bothering to acknowledge his order, and Sharaq slumped deeper into the moulded leather of his reclined seat. Sweat coated his brow and his hair was soaked. He closed his eyes for a second, shutting out the data noise of the Manifold and letting the human part of his mind process the near calamitous events of the past few minutes.

Had it really been so short an engagement?

He opened his eyes as the nagging static of the vox remained unbroken by orders, information requests or any form of leadership from Victorix Magna.

Sharaq looked over to the Stormlord's engine, a terrible sense of dread building in his gut as he saw that Victorix Magna remained as she had since taking up station before the Imperator. That dread built as he saw fluid drooling in a black rain from her torso and that the hissing plumes of superheated steam that ought to gust like breath from exhaust vents beneath her shoulder carapace had ceased.

The engine's head was bowed, her limbs slack against her sides.

'Victorix Magna,' called Sharaq over the Manifold, his fear rendering his communication sharper than he intended. 'Princeps Cavalerio, please acknowledge.'

There was no response.

'Stormlord, please respond immediately!'

A shift of view in the Manifold and Sharaq's head sank to his chest as he inloaded the auspex readings of the Stormlord's mighty engine Victorix Magna was dead.

Thousands of kilometres to the south of the confrontation between Mortis and Tempestus, deep in the desolate, empty wilderness of the southern pallidus, wind-borne ash blew across the cratered wastelands at the edge of the Daedalia Planum.

Even further south, the horizon burned with colourful fire, the skies striated with chemical pollutants and reeking gases expelled from the massive refineries that encircled the planet's equator.

Only the hardiest scavengers attempted to eke out a living in this region of Mars, the spoil pickings usually too thin and too laden with toxins to be of any real use. One such scavenger was a man named Quinux, a wizened prospector and former Skitarii whose body had rejected the gross implants necessary for full assimilation into the ranks of the Mechanicum's soldiery.

Quinux scoured the deserts and hardpan of the Daedalia Planum in a ramshackle Cargo-5 bulk-hauler that pulled a tender filled with scrap metal, held together by faith, hope and fervent devotions to the Machine-God. Its plates were caked with rust and its tracks streaked with corrosion from prolonged exposure to the hostile environment.

Acrid fumes belched from the exhausts of his crawler, and the interior of his pressurised cabin smelled of sweat, recycled nutrient paste and excitement. A cracked and filmy auspex panel hung from the roof of the cabin, pinging with a hard return of solid material.

Quinux hadn't seen a signal this strong in decades and knew that this find could be the making of him. Whatever it was, it was big, and his head darted from side to side, peering through the crazed glass of his cabin as he searched for any other scavengers that might have picked up this juicy find, not that he could see much through the whipping scatls of dust and ash that swirled around the crawler.

His vehicle dipped into a gentle slope that gradually widened out into a shallow crater. The ground under the tracks was soft, irradiated sand, carried there by the freak atmospherics that blew from the monstrous refineries of black iron in the south.

The pings of the auspex grew more urgent, and he saw that he was practically right on top of his find, though he couldn't make out much beyond the dirty glass. Unhooking the auspex from the roof, Quinux hefted a simple bolt-action lascarbine from the back of his cab and checked the load.

There wasn't much left in it, but enough to deal with any feral servitors that might be lurking out in the wasteland. Looking at his useless augmetics, Quinux felt a certain sympathy with the poor, wretched servitors, but not so much that he wouldn't put a bolt through their skulls if they tried to get between him and his find.

Next he lifted his pack and slid his arms through the straps before wrapping his rebreather hood tightly around his head. Quinux then opened the cab to the elements, wincing at the force of the gale that plucked at his robes and threatened to slam the door back in his face.

Getting too old for this life, he thought as he climbed down the ladder and stepped onto the sand. He followed the strident chimes of the auspex towards a large dune field ahead of him, trying to make out what it was reading. He couldn't see anything valuable, but as he drew closer, he saw that the nearest dune was a damn sight taller and more regular in shape than the others.

Consulting the auspex, Quinux was pretty sure that whatever he was picking up was beneath the dune. Perhaps a flyer had crashed or an ore tanker had been forced to ditch and then been covered by the sands before its crew could send out a distress signal.

Whichever it was, it marked the end of a lean patch for Quinux Fortran.

He slid the auspex into a zipped pocket in his robes and slung his rifle as he approached the dune, clambering up on all fours as the sand spilled away beneath him. Climbing the dune was hard work and he sweated profusely in the dry heat.

Quinux reached the top of the dune and began clearing away the sand with a collapsible shovel from his pack. With quick, economical strokes he dug down into the sand, widening and deepening the hole as he went.

Pausing only to take regular sips of brackish water from his hide canteen, Quinux gradually cleared the top of the dune. The wind attempted to thwart his labours, blowing fresh sand and ash back into the hole, but after an hour of digging, his shovel struck metal and he gave a grunt of pleasure.

'Right, let's see what you are then,' he said, dropping the shovel and sweeping his gloved hands over the find.

It was metal sure enough, fresh and untainted by corrosion or rust. The surface patina was blackened, as though it had been scorched by intense heat, but as he scraped the edge of his shovel across it, he could see that the damage was only superficial.

He cleared more sand away, guessing that the main body of whatever lay beneath him was roughly spherical from the curve of the exposed metal. More shovelfuls were scooped from the ground, and Quinux frowned as he saw the outline of what looked like some kind of battle robot emerge.

Three blisters of metal faced him, like sensor domes, but devoid of life.

'Now what in the name of the Omnissiah would you be doin' out here?'

The auspex chimed. Loud. A strong signal.

Puzzled, Quinux dug the device from his robes and looked around him for the source.

He could hear the roar of engines above the howl of the wind, but couldn't pinpoint its source. Quickly he swept up his rifle, ready to defend his find, but there was nothing to see.

A harsh beam of light stabbed from the sky above him and Quinux shielded his eyes as the roaring engine noise leapt in volume. The down-draught of a flyer's powerful jets blew up a storm of smoke and dust.

He couldn't see anything through the whipping ash, but kept his rifle pulled hard into his shoulder. The pitch of the engines changed from a howl to a whine as the craft descended, and moments later the stablight was replaced with the diffuse glow of landing lights.

As the dust settled, Quinux looked up and saw a group of people marching towards him from the belly of a heavy lifter, an aircraft capable of transporting enormous items of machinery in its hold.

The dust blurred the newcomers' forms, but whoever they were they weren't getting a piece of this mother-lode.

'This here's mine!' he shouted, jerking the barrel of his rifle towards the dune. 'I found it and you ain't gonna take it off me. I got salvage rights.'

The figures stepped into view, and Quinux's heart sank as he saw a host of brutal-looking, body-armoured Skitarii led by a robed adept of the Mechanicum. The adept was swathed in thick red robes and augmented with a multitude of glowing green cybernetics on snaking manipulators. He wore an iron mask with glowing red eyes and a huge mechanised device hunched at his shoulders.

'Actually you don't,' said the adept, one of his green-lit manip arms aiming at the machine beneath the sand. 'That machine belongs to me.'

'And who the hell are you?'

'I am Master-Adept Lukas Chrom.'

'Never heard of you,' said Quinux.

The light at the end of Chrom's manip arm flashed and he said, 'Come. I am here to take you back to Mondus Gamma.'

'I aint' goin' nowhere with you,' snapped Quinux.

'I was not talking to you,' said Chrom. 'I was talking to the Kaban Machine.'

The sand beneath Quinux trembled, and he looked down in alarm as the sensor blisters he had uncovered lit up with a yellow glow. A tremble of power vibrated through the machine as its dormant power cells came back online and returned it to life.

It lurched forward, and Quinux lost his balance, sliding end over end down the shifting sand and losing his grip on his rifle. He fell to the ground and rolled onto his back as the awakened machine emerged from its concealment.

Nearly ten metres tall, its mass was roughly spherical with two heavily weaponised arms attached on opposite sides. Behind high pauldrons to protect its sensor apparatus, a number of metallic arms extended from its shoulders, like massively thick mechadendrites equipped with a variety of lethal looking weapons.

The machine sat immobile for a few moments before training its weapons on his bulk-hauler.

'No!' shouted Quinux, rising to his feet and scrambling towards the adept. His cry of protest was drowned out in a blaze of gunfire as sheeting hails of light blasted from the Kaban Machine's weapons.

Quinux's vehicle exploded in a smoky orange fireball, the over-pressure of the blast swatting him to the ground. He gasped acrid, toxin-laden air and realised that the explosion had torn the breathing apparatus from his face.

He scrambled for his rebreather hood, but couldn't find it, feeling airborne poisons eating away the blood vessels of his lungs with every breath. He rolled onto his side, coughing up thick wads of phlegmy mucus as he felt a heavy rumbling through the ground.

The machine was moving and more of the sand fell away. Quinux saw its body was mounted on a heavy-gauge track unit that threshed sand before it gained traction and rumbled forward.

Quinux scrabbled pitifully at the ashen ground as it rolled towards him.

'Please! No!' he screamed, the words gurgling as blood poured from his mouth.

Its sensor blisters glittering with cold mechanical purpose, the Kaban Machine ignored his pleas and ground Quinux into the Martian soil beneath its bulk.

Beneath the towering peak of Olympus Mons, the Fabricator General watched as a parade of augmented Praetorian battle servitors marched from the labyrinth of Moravec. They moved by a variety of means of locomotion - some on tracks, some on clicking mechanical legs, others on thick, rubberised wheels, while some retained the use of their human legs.

They filled the great engine hangars beneath the mountain, thousands of newly enhanced warriors ready to fight for Horus Lupercal. The power revealed within the Vaults of Moravec was like nothing Kelbor-Hal had ever known, the joyous tumult of it filling his flood-stream with vigour and insight beyond that of beings composed merely of flesh.

Kelbor-Hal felt a surge of raw, unfettered aggressive power through his crackling energy fields as he watched the assembling army. This was a time of great moment, though only he and Regulus were here to witness it.

That would soon change when the dreadful war engines of the Mechanicum were unleashed, these weapons of the Dark Mechanicum.

The weaponised servitors were huge, muscular and sheathed in layered armour that was blackened like scorched flesh, their spines hunched over and threaded with barbed spikes. Those without mouths burbled scrapcode from integral augmitters, a glorious hymnal to the newest power on Mars. Others, with etched bronze frightmasks, spilled nonsense from bloodied lips that twisted and leered with brutal anticipation.

Beside Kelbor-Hal, Regulus watched the procession with glee, his electrical field warping and twisting with pleasure as each of the newly transformed servitor warriors emerged and took position within the great hangar.

'These are magnificent, Fabricator General,' said Regulus in admiration. 'The power of the warp and the power of the Mechanicum alloyed together in glorious fusion.'

Kelbor-Hal accepted the compliment, knowing that Lukas Chrom had done the bulk of the work, but unwilling to admit the fact. He had simply combined Chrom's advances in artificial sentience with the power contained within the Vaults of Moravec to produce something wondrous.

'These servitors are just the beginning,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'We begin work on the Skitarii next. The scrapcode has worked its way through the entire floodstream network of Olympus Mons, and is already spreading beyond Tharsis.'

Virtually every port and connective point on Mars was linked somewhere, and the glorious code of the warp was scurrying along every conduit, wire, fibre-optic, wireless feed and haptic implant. Soon it would reach every forge and adept, and those touched by its transformative power would be born anew.

'I can feel forges as far away as Sinus Sabaeus already scratching with elements of transformed code,' confirmed Regulus. 'Soon the aegis protocols of the other forges will be broken down to allow the scrapcode into their inner workings.'

'Then they will be ours,' hissed Kelbor-Hal.

'There will be resistance,' replied Regulus. 'Not all the forges are as vulnerable to the scrapcode. The Magma City's links have proved to be resistant, as are those of Ipluvien Maximal and Fabricator Locum Kane.'

Kelbor-Hal nodded. 'That is only to be expected. Adept Zeth is pioneering a newly developed form of noospheric data transfer. Her forge and those of her allies have been modified to utilise it over more traditional forms of communication.'

'Noospheric? I am not familiar with the term.'

'No matter,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'It will be ours soon enough. I have dispatched Ambassador Melgator to the Magma City to sequester her data and determine her loyalties.'

'I already know her loyalties, Fabricator General. She is an enemy of the Warmaster.'

Given what had happened after the opening of the Vaults of Moravec, it was hard to fault Regulus's logic.

When the skies above Olympus Mons had raged and buckled at the bloody dawn of this new power, freakishly induced weather patterns carried the echoes of its shrill afterbirth from the Great Mountain to every corner of Mars.

Every corner but one.

As the seething Martian skies darkened, a searing surge of psychic energy above Koriel Zeth's Magma City had pierced the heavens and almost drowned the birth-shout of the emergent power with its light and violence.

Kelbor-Hal did not fully understand what he had witnessed that day, but Regulus had watched the event, the spiking flares of his magnetic field betraying his naked fear and hostility.

'What was that?' he had asked. 'An accident? A weapon?'

'An enemy revealed,' was all Regulus had said.

2.02

She was trapped in the darkness. She tried to wake, but there was only the utter, unbreakable darkness in all directions. In truth, she could not even think in terms of directions, for this space appeared to be dimensionless. She had no sensation of up or down and no sense of the passage of time. Had she been here for long? She couldn't remember. She couldn't remember much of anything.

Her memories were hazy. She had once roamed freely, she remembered that much, feeding, birthing and extinguishing stars without heed, but now…

Now there was only the eternal darkness of death.

No, not death, but was it sleep? Or was it imprisonment?

She didn't know.

All she knew was that if this was not death, it might as well be for all the power left to her.

Were these memories or hallucinations?

She perceived of herself as female, but even that meant nothing. What did sex matter to a being of pure energy and matter?

Her mind roamed the darkness, but whether she ventured across the span of galaxies or travelled only millimetres, she couldn't tell. Did she journey for mere moments or the lifespan of a universe?

Many of the dimensions she was thinking in were meaningless to her, yet she sensed that they were all equally ludicrous in this darkness. Nothing existed here, nothing but the darkness.

Nothing.

Except that wasn't always true, was it?

Sometimes there was light, tiny sparks in the darkness that were gone as soon as they were noticed. Holes of light would sometimes appear in the darkness through which elements of her being could be drawn, atoms of existence planed from a life the size of a star, unnoticed but for the promise of a world beyond the darkness they brought.

She tried to focus on one such light, but no sooner had she registered its presence than it was gone, only the tantalising hope of its return sustaining her. This was no life, this was pure existence sustained at the verge of extinction by the forgotten mechanics of Old Science.

Dalia.

The sound came again, no more than a whisper, barely heard and perhaps only imagined.

Dalia.

The word gave meaning to form, and she began to build a sense of scale and place with the concepts given weight by the sounds. As more and more of her surroundings became concrete, she began to re-establish her sense of self.

Dalia.

That was her name.

She was a human being… not a creature of unimaginable scale that defied time and the material universe with its power. Indeed, she wasn't sure if creature was a term large enough to encompass the immensity of its existence.

She did not exist in the darkness. She was not a prisoner hurled into the lightless depths of the world by an armoured gaoler and bound with golden chains.

She was Dalia Cythera.

And with that thought, she woke.

Information passed around Mars in a multitude of ways, along trillions of kilometres of cabling, through fibre-optics, fizzing electrical field clouds, wireless networks and hololithic conduits. The exact workings of the ancient mechanics by which many of the forges communicated were unknown, and even the magi that made use of such things did not fully understand them.

Almost all the myriad means of information transfer were, however, vulnerable to the corrupting influence of the scrapcode boiling out from the depths of Olympus Mons in the dead of the Martian night.

It moved outwards like a hunting raptor, drawn by the scent and flow of information. Everything it touched it corrupted, twisting elegantly crafted code into something vile and debased. The wondrous flickering, chattering cant of pure machine language, the gurgle of liquid data and gleaming information-rich light became a hateful birth scream of something malformed and evil.

At the speed of thought, it spread across the planet's surface, slipping like an assassin into the networks of the Martian forges and wreaking untold damage. The aegis barriers tried to hold it back, but it overwhelmed them in moments with its ferocity and diabolical invention.

A few, a very few, forgemasters were quick enough to cut themselves off from the networks when they saw the danger, but so deeply enmeshed were they with the Martian information exchange systems that it was impossible to avoid exposure completely.

Replicating itself at a terrifying rate, the scrapcode found each forge's weakest point and induced disastrous system failures at every turn.

At Sinus Sabaeus, the continent-sized assembly lines of Leman Russ battle tanks ground to a halt, and machines that had run without interruption for over a century seized up, never to operate again.

In the Tycho Brahe ammunition storage facility, a rogue set of commands raised the temperature in the promethium tanks until a catastrophic explosion ripped through the lower storage levels. Liquid flame bloomed up through the crater, igniting a devastating conflagration that engulfed the entire facility, detonating billions of tonnes of ordnance and obliterating the holdings of High Adept Jaigo.

The great Schiaparelli Repository on the Acidalia Planitia, a towering pyramid of unlocked data from the earliest days of mankind's mastery of science and gathered wisdom from across the ages, was infected with scrapcode, and twenty thousand years' worth of knowledge was rendered down into howling nonsense.

Warning klaxons and shift horns blared as the scrap-code issued commands and countermanded them an instant later, the forges of Mars screaming at the violation done to their wondrous mechanics. Machines screeched and shrieked as rogue current surged through their workings, blowing circuits and frying delicate mechanisms that would never be repaired.

Almost no corner of Mars was safe from the scrapcode, which gathered momentum and ambition as it encircled the globe in an ever-tightening web of malice.

The chemical refineries of Vastitas Borealis opened their pressure valves and flooded the workers' hive-sinks of the northern polar basin with a mix of methyl iso-cyanate, phosgene and hydrogen chloride. The deadly cloud slowly oozed down into the sinks, killing every living soul as it went, and by morning's light, over nine hundred thousand people were dead.

As if relishing this method of murder, the scrapcode then killed the astropaths of Medusa Fossae, altering the breathing mix of their life support until each psyker was being fed hydrogen cyanide gas. Within minutes, over six thousand astropaths were dead, and after one plaintive death scream that was felt in the Emperor's vaults beneath the surface of Terra, Mars fell utterly silent.

Ipluvien Maximal was one of the lucky few able to sever his links with the networks before too much damage was done, though three of his fusion reactors along the Ulysses Fossae suffered critical meltdowns, the mushroom clouds of their detonations drifting east and north, forever irradiating thousands of square kilometres of the Martian soil.

The same story was enacted all across the surface of the red planet, machines rebelling as their internal workings were overloaded with contradictory commands. The death toll climbed into the millions within minutes as forges exploded, toxic chemicals spilled through manufactories and mass-storage facilities of explosive materials cooked off in devastating daisy chains of detonations.

In years to come this night would become known as the Death of Innocence.

Only the forge of Adept Koriel Zeth escaped unscathed, the torrents of crackling scrapcode unwilling or unable to travel the glittering golden wires that had recently carried the Emperor's light along them. Like positively charged iron filings flowing around a similarly charged magnet, the scrapcode bypassed the Magma City altogether.

It was the one ray of hope in an otherwise bleak night.

Caxton and Zouche needed a shave and Severine looked as though she hadn't slept in days. Even Mellicin, logical, unflappable Mellicin, looked deflated in the aftermath of the disastrous trial of the Akashic reader. They sat around Dalia's bed in the medicae wing of the Magma City, fussing over her as medical servitors drew blood and monitored her vitals.

The room smelled of counterseptic, soap and the lapping powder Adept Zeth was fond of using on her armour.

'You gave us quite a scare, young lady,' Zouche had said as he entered the room and saw that Dalia was awake. Dalia had been touched at the genuine emotion she saw in the gruff machinist's face.

'Sorry,' she said. 'I didn't mean to.'

'Didn't mean to, she says,' said Caxton with a forced laugh, though Dalia could see the dark shadows under the young man's eyes, the puffiness where his tears had fallen. 'Yanks open a door to a chamber flooded with psychic energy and says she didn't mean to.'

'Well I didn't,' said Dalia, aware of how foolish she sounded. 'I just couldn't leave Jonas in there.'

None of them would meet her gaze and they had shared a moment of regret for the dead.

Severine had taken Jonas's death particularly hard, and Dalia reached out to take her hand. The severity she had first seen in her face had melted away over the last few weeks and Dalia's heart ached to see the sadness in her friend's eyes.

Not a single trace of Jonas had been found in the chamber, not so much as an atom of his body to prove that he had existed at all. Likewise, none of the psykers encased in the coffered dome had survived the titanic energies of the Astronomican, their desiccated corpses withered and contracted into foetal balls.

All told, the death toll was two thousand and thirty-seven, and that figure was like an adamantium chain of grief around all their necks. They did not yet know of the night of devastation that had been so recently unleashed and how slight a loss this was compared to that suffered by the rest of Mars.

Dalia had since been told that she had been languishing in the grip of an unchanging coma for over seven days, watched over by Caxton, a host of bio-monitors and a pict-camera linked to the nearby medical station.

She learned that Caxton had refused to leave her bedside, despite repeated assurances from the others that they would take shifts in watching her. It had been five hours since Dalia had woken, though the bulk of that time had been spent being questioned by Adept Zeth. Her friends had only just been granted access to her.

'What's Adept Zeth saying about what happened?' asked Severine after they had exchanged hugs and shed tears together. 'She must be disappointed the machine didn't work.'

'Didn't it?' asked Zouche, narrowing his eyes. 'It overloaded, but the machine functioned as it should have, just not for very long.'

'What did Adept Zeth ask you, Dalia?' asked Mellicin, cutting to the heart of the matter.

Dalia saw their inquisitive looks, knowing that they too were curious as to what had transpired within the chamber of the Akashic reader.

'She wanted to know everything that happened in the chamber and everything Jonas Milus said to me.'

'What did he say?' asked Caxton.

She squeezed Caxton's hand, glancing up at the pict-camera in the upper corner of the room.

'He just died,' said Dalia. 'He didn't say anything at all.'

The Medicae pronounced Dalia fit to resume her duties the following morning, and the next six rotations were spent in Zeth's inner forge rebuilding the Akashic reader, replacing those parts that had burned out and recalibrating those that had survived.

Zeth and Dalia had made assumptions and now they were paying for them. Dalia should have requested clarification on Zeth's figures, but she had been so focused on the minutiae of the project she had not thought to doubt the adept's numbers.

That wasn't going to happen again. Rigorous double testing and checking procedures were enforced and every servitor had its work reviewed by a living, breathing adept.

The silver wiring in the floor had melted through and whole sections were pulled up and replaced with slabs impregnated with a higher gauge of cable. Every aspect of the machine's parts was examined and re-evaluated to see if there were ways of improving its performance and ensuring that it did not fail again.

Scores of adepts and servitors laboured in the dome alongside Dalia and her friends, though there was none of the shared sense of wonder that had enthused them when previously working on the Akashic reader. Only the biting drills of the servitors broke the silence of the dome as they lifted floor slabs and carried them away.

The coffers in the dome were empty, and as unnerving as it had been working beneath the sightless eyes of the bound psykers, everyone felt their absence more acutely. The vacant berths were a grim reminder of the deaths caused by the machine they were working on, and the assembled workers kept their heads fixed firmly on the job at hand.

Zeth spoke little to Dalia, the adept forced to spend most of her time dealing with the fallout from their abortive experiment. The adept left her apprenta, a magos named Polk, in charge, and, under his and Rho-mu 31's supervision, work continued much as before.

Dalia had asked Rho-mu 31 once why Adept Zeth was absent from the dome, but all the robed Protector had said was, 'She has matters of greater importance to attend to.'

Dalia had thought the Akashic reader was Zeth's greatest work, so clearly there had been consequences that not even an adept of Zeth's stature could ignore. Those few times Dalia and Zeth had passed words, she simply reaffirmed that Jonas Milus had not spoken to her.

Zeth would nod in weary acceptance, but Dalia could read the adept's disbelief in her noospheric aura… as well as veiled fear that spoke to Dalia of events far more terrible than a failed test.

She wasn't exactly sure why she was unwilling to share the empath's words with Zeth, but the intuitive part of her mind, the part that had led her to the design of the Akashic reader, told her that to inform the adept of what she knew - which wasn't much anyway - could very well be dangerous.

Knowledge is power, guard it well, wasn't that one of the Mechanicum's aphorisms?

Dalia intended to guard this knowledge very well and there were only a few people she dared trust with it.

Adept Zeth was not one of them.

Work on the newly reconstructed Akashic reader was almost complete, the tolerances and capacity of the receptors altered to allow for the increased power expected to flow through the device upon its next activation.

Many months would need to pass before Mars and Terra would be in alignment once more, but for the next few rotations, the power of the Astronomican was still a vast resource of harvestable psychic energy.

Fresh psykers were already being installed within the coffers, though there had been no sign of another empath for the throne atop the dais, a fact for which Dalia was pathetically grateful.

As the activity in the dome neared completion, Dalia approached the workbench where Zouche and Caxton worked on the helmet assembly. Zouche was plugged into the lathe via extruded dendrites in his wrist, and the hissing of the laser lathe cutting through high-grade steel was a shrieking banshee howl.

Dalia winced as the sound bit into the meat of her brain.

Caxton saw her coming and smiled, lifting his hand in greeting. She smiled and returned the gesture as Zouche looked up from his labours and shut off the lathe.

'Dalia,' said Zouche, withdrawing his mechadendrites from the workbench and flipping up his protective goggles. 'How are you today?'

'I'm fine, Zouche,' she said, her gaze shifting to the dais where the bronze armoured figure of Adept Zeth and Rho-mu 31 supervised the work of Mellicin and Severine. 'Please, can you turn the lathe back on?'

'Back on?' asked Zouche, glancing over at Caxton. 'Why?'

'Please, just do it.'

'What's the matter, Dalia?' asked Caxton. 'You sure you're allright?'

'I'm fine,' repeated Dalia. 'Please, turn the lathe back on, I need to talk to you both, but I don't want anyone to hear.'

Zouche shrugged and reconnected with the workbench to activate the laser. Once again, the hiss of cutting metal filled the air as the manip plate moved the steel around the spitting lathe. Both Zouche and Caxton leaned in as Dalia spoke.

'The damper we used in the reader, the part that blocks external interference from interfacing with the empath's helmet, can you make a portable version of it?'

Zouche frowned. 'A portable one. Why?'

'To block out vox-thieves and disrupt pict-feed,' said Caxton, guessing Dalia's meaning.

'Yes,' agreed Dalia. 'Exactly.'

'I'm not sure about this,' said Zouche. 'I don't like the notion of secrecy. Nothing good can come of it.'

'Look, can you make it or not?' asked Dalia.

'Of course, we can,' said Caxton, his boyish face alight at the prospect of mischief. 'It's simple, isn't it, Zouche?'

'Yes, it's simple, but why would you want such a device?' asked Zouche, 'What's so secret that you need to stop anyone hearing it?'

'I need to talk to you, Mellicin and Severine too, and I need to be sure we're the only one's listening.'

'Talk to us about what?'

'About what Jonas Milus said to me.'

'I thought you said he didn't say anything,' pointed out Caxton.

'I lied,' said Dalia.

They met at the end of shift in the refectoria hall, an echoing space filled with replenishing servitors and hungry labourers, menials and adepts. The hall was rife with rumour, the few information networks that were functional burbling with fragments of frightened talk of catastrophic accidents and unnatural incidents all across Mars.

Gathering like conspirators, they sat as far from any listening ears as it was possible to get, but with each clique muttering their suspicions about what was happening beyond the walls of Adept Zeth's forge, no one was paying them any mind anyway.

As they huddled around the smallest table that could accommodate them all, Dalia took a long, hard look at her friends, judging how they might react to what she was about to tell them.

Caxton seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, while Zouche looked nervous at their conspiratorial gathering. Mellicin's posture spoke of her unease, and Severine looked as expressionless and pale as she had since Jonas Milus's death.

'Zouche?' said Dalia. 'Did you bring it?'

'Aye, girl, I did,' nodded Zouche. 'It's working. No one can hear what we're saying.'

'What's this all about, Dalia?' asked Mellicin. 'Why did we have to meet like this?'

'I'm sorry, but I didn't know how else to do this.'

'Do what?' asked Zouche. 'I don't see why we need to skulk about like this just because the damned empath spoke to you.'

Severine's head snapped up and her eyes flashed. 'Jonas spoke to you?'

Dalia nodded. 'Yes, he did.'

'What did he say?'

'Not much,' admitted Dalia. 'And what he did say didn't make much sense then.'

'And now?' asked Mellicin, the wan light of the refectoria gleaming from the metallic half-mask of her face. 'Your words imply they make more sense now.'

'Well, sort of. I'm not sure, but maybe.'

'Clarity, Dalia,' said Mellicin. 'Remember clarity in all things. First of all, tell us what the empath said.'

'His name was Jonas,' snapped Severine. 'He had a name. All of you, he had a name and it was Jonas.'

'I am well aware of that,' said Mellicin, without pause. 'Dalia, if you please.'

Feeling everyone's eyes upon her, Dalia reddened and took a deep breath before speaking. The words came easily to her, each one seared onto her brain like an acid etching on glass.

'He said, ''I have seen it! All knowledge.'' And even though he was right in front of me it sounded like he was speaking from somewhere really far away, like the other side of Mars or somewhere far underground.'

'Is that it?' asked Severine, disappointment plain on her angular face.

'No,' said Dalia. 'I told him I was sorry about what was happening to him and he said that he didn't want my pity. He said that he'd seen the truth and that he was free.'

'Free of what?' asked Zouche.

'I don't know,' said Dalia. 'He said, ' ''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''. It was horrible, his mouth burning with fire and his voice fading away with every word.'

'The labyrinth of night?' asked Caxton. 'Are you sure that's what he said?'

'Yes, absolutely,' said Dalia. 'The labyrinth of night.'

'The Noctis Labyrinthus,' said Mellicin, and Caxton nodded.

Dalia looked at the pair of them. 'Noctis Labyrinthus… what's that?'

'The Labyrinth of Night, it's what Noctis Labyrinthus means,' replied Caxton.

'What kind of place is it?' asked Dalia, elated to have found some meaning in words that had previously been meaningless. 'Is it a mountain, a crater? What?'

Mellicin shook her head, a nictitating membrane flickering over her augmetic eye as she dredged information from her memory coils.

'Neither. The Noctis Labyrinthus is a broken region of land between the Tharsis uplands and the Valles Marineris,' said Mellicin, the words spoken with the tone of someone retrieving data from an internal memory coil. 'Notable for its maze-like system of deep, sheer-walled valleys, it is thought to have been formed by faulting in a previous age. Also, many of the canyons display typical features of grabens, with the upland plain surface clearly preserved on the valley floor.'

Dalia frowned, wondering what this desolate region of Mars had to do with what Jonas had said. 'Is it empty?'

'More or less,' said Caxton. 'Adept Lukas Chrom has his Mondus Gamma forge to the south of it, but apart from him, we're the nearest forge.'

'So there's no one there at all?'

'It's not a region of Mars anyone has any real interest in,' said Mellicin. 'I'm told a number of adepts attempted to found their forges there, but none lasted very long.'

'Why not?'

'I don't know, they just didn't. Supposedly the forges were plagued by technical problems. The adepts claimed the region was inimical to the machine-spirits and they abandoned their workings to set up elsewhere.'

'So nobody knows what's there?' said Dalia. 'Whatever Jonas was talking about is somewhere in the Noctis Labyrinthus, it's got to be. The grand lie and this great truth.'

'It's possible,' conceded Mellicin, 'but what do you think he was talking about? Have you any idea what this… Dragon is he speaks of the Emperor slaying?'

Dalia leaned in closer. 'I don't know exactly what it is, but I've been working through my remembrances of the texts I transcribed back on Terra and I've found out quite a bit.'

'Like what?' asked Severine.

'Well, Jonas spoke about the Emperor slaying the Dragon of Mars, so I looked into any references to dragons first.'

'Looked into how?'

'You know, in my memory,' said Dalia. 'I told you, I read stuff and I don't forget it.'

Mellicin smiled. 'That is a useful talent, Dalia. Continue.'

'Right, well, we all know about mythical dragons?'

'Of course,' said Zouche. 'Children's stories.'

Dalia shook her head. 'Maybe, but I think there's more to Jonas's words than that. Some of it, anyway. I mean, yes, I found lots of stories of heroic knights in shining armour slaying dragons and rescuing maidens in return for their hands in marriage.'

'Typical,' said Severine. 'You never read of a maiden rescuing a man from a dragon.'

'I guess not,' agreed Dalia. 'I suppose it didn't fit with the times when they were written.'

'Carry on, Dalia,' said Mellicin. 'What else did you learn?'

'There wasn't much that could be called fact, but I remember several tracts that purported to be historical works, but which I think were probably mythology, since they dealt with monsters like dragons and daemons as well as describing the rise of warlords and tyrants.'

'Do you remember the names of these books?' asked Zouche.

Dalia nodded. 'Yes. The main ones were The Chronicles of Ursh, Revelati Draconis and The Obyte Fortis. They all spoke of dragons, serpentine monsters that breathed fire and carried away fair maidens to devour.'

'I know those stories,' said Caxton. 'I read them as a child. Bloody stuff, but stirring.'

'I know them too,' cut in Zouche. 'But for my people they're more than just stories, Caxton. The Scholars of Nusa Kambangan taught that they were allegorical representations of the coming of the Emperor, symbolic representations of the forces of light overcoming darkness.'

'That's right,' said Dalia, excitedly. 'The slayer represents some all-powerful godhead and the dragon represents dangerous forces of chaos and disorder. The dragon-slaying hero was a symbol of increasing consciousness and individuation - the journey into maturity.'

'Can't they just be stories?' asked Caxton. 'Why does everything have to mean something?'

Dalia ignored him and pressed on. 'The one thing a lot of these stories have in common is that the dragon, even though it's beaten, isn't destroyed, but is somehow sublimated into a form where goodness and sentient life can flow into the world from its defeat.'

'What does that even mean?' asked Severine.

'All right, put it this way,' said Dalia, using her hands as much as her words to communicate her increasing passions. 'In Revelati Draconis, the writer describes a dragon slain by a sky god with a thunder weapon to free the waters needed to nourish the world. Another tale speaks of a murdered serpent goddess who held mysterious tablets and whose body was used to create the heavens and earth.'

'Yes,' said Caxton. 'That's right. And there was a story in The Chronicles of Ursh about these creatures… the Unkerhi I think they were called, who were destroyed by the ''Thunder Warrior''. Supposedly their remains became a range of mountains somewhere on the Merican continent.'

'Exactly,' said Dalia. 'There's a footnote towards the end of the Chronicles where the writer describes a race of creatures known as Fomorians that were said to control the fertility of the earth.'

'Let me guess,' said Zouche. 'They were defeated, but not destroyed, because their continued existence was necessary for the good of the world.'

'Got it in one,' said Dalia.

'So what does all this mean?' asked Severine. 'It's all very interesting, but why does talking about dragons need a vox-blocker?'

'Isn't it obvious?' asked Dalia, before remembering that her friends didn't possess the innate faculties for data recall that she did. 'It's clear that these defeated forces, these dragons, were still considered valuable, and it follows that these early writers understood that the conflict between dragon and dragonslayer wasn't a contest of genocide for one or the other, but an eternal struggle. For the good of the world, both sides needed to have their powers expressed and the balance maintained. Even these ancient enemies needed one another.'

'Your logic being that it is the struggle, not the victory, that supplies the needful conditions for the world,' said Mellicin.

Dalia beamed at Mellicin. 'Yes, it's like summer and winter,' she said. 'Eternal summer would burn the world up, but eternal winter would freeze it to death. It's the fact that they alternate that allows life to grow and flourish.'

'So I ask again, what's the point of all this?' said Severine.

Dalia looked into the faces of her friends, unsure of how to phrase the next part of her confession. Would they believe her or would they think her proximity to the flaring energies of the Astronomican had unhinged her? She took a deep breath and decided she had come too far to back out now.

'When I was in the coma after the accident I think… I think I became part of something, some other, much larger, consciousness. It felt like my mind had detached from my body.'

'An out of body hallucination,' said Zouche. 'Quite common in near death experiences.'

'No,' said Dalia. 'It was more than that. I don't know how else to explain it, but it was as if the Akashic reader had allowed my mind to… link with something old. I mean, really old, older than this planet or anything else we can possibly imagine.'

'What do you think it was?' asked Mellicin.

'I think it was the dragon that Jonas was talking about.'

'The dragon he said the Emperor slew.'

'That's just it,' said Dalia. 'I don't think it's dead at all. I think that's what Jonas was trying to tell me. The Dragon of Mars is still alive beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus… and I need your help to find it.'

He opened his eyes and tried to scream, feeling the heartsick spike of agonising pain in his chest once more. He thrashed his limbs, palms beating on slick glass surfaces, his movements glutinous. His world was a blur of pink, and he blinked in an effort to clear his vision. He reached up to wipe his eyes clean, the sensation of movement like swimming through thick, gluey water.

A shape swam at the edge of his vision, humanoid, but he couldn't focus on it yet.

His head ached and his body felt unutterably heavy, despite its apparent suspension in buoyancy fluids. He felt weightless pain from every portion of his body, but that was nothing in comparison to the crushing weight of sorrow in his heart.

He remembered sleeping, or at least periods of darkness where the pain was lessened, but nothing that truly eased the abominable, unfocused sadness he felt. He knew he had woken here before, having heard fragments of distant conversations where words like ''miracle'', ''brain-death'' and ''infarction'' were used. Without context, the words were meaningless, but he knew they were being applied to his condition.

He blinked as he heard yet more words, and fought to get the sense of them.

Forcing himself to focus on the voice, he swam through the jelly-like fluid of his world.

The shape spoke again, or at least he thought he heard its voice, the words soft and boneless, as though filtered through faulty augmitters.

He pulled himself forward until his face was pressed to a pane of thick glass. His vision swam into focus, and he saw an antiseptic chamber of polished ceramic tiles and metal gurneys beyond the glass. Spider-like devices hung from the ceiling and a number of fluid-filled glass tanks were fitted into brass sockets on the far wall.

Standing before him was a young woman robed in blue and silver. Her form wavered through the liquid, but she smiled at him and the sight was pathetically welcome.

'Princeps Cavalerio, can you hear me?' she asked, the words snapping into sudden clarity.

He tried to reply, but his mouth was full of liquid, bubbles forming on his lips as they worked to form sounds.

'Princeps?'

'Yes,' he said, his facility for language returning to him at last.

'He's awake,' said the young woman, the words said to an unseen occupant of the chamber. He heard the relief in her voice and wondered why she was so pleased to hear him speak.

'Where am I?' he asked.

'You are in the medicae facility, princeps.'

'Medicae? Where?'

'In Ascraeus Mons,' said the woman. 'You are home.'

Ascraeus Mons… the fortress mountain of Legio Tempestus.

Yes, this was his home. This was where he had formally been awarded his princepture nearly two centuries ago. This was where he had first ascended the groaning elevator to the cockpit of…

Pain surged in his chest and he gasped, drawing in a lungful of oxygenated fluids. His conscious mind rebelled at the idea of breathing liquid, but his body knew better than he that it could survive the experience and gradually his panic eased, though not his pain.

'Who are you?' he asked as his breathing normalised.

'My name is Agathe, I am to be your famulous.'

'Famulous?'

'An aide, if you will. Someone to minister to your needs.'

'Why do I need a famulous?' he demanded. 'I am no cripple!'

'With respect, my princeps, you have just awoken from what must have been a traumatic severance. You will need assistance to adjust. I am to provide that for you.'

'I don't understand,' said Cavalerio. 'How did I come to be here?'

Agathe hesitated, clearly reluctant to provide an answer to his question. Eventually she said, 'Perhaps we might discuss that at a later date, my princeps? After you have had time to adjust to your new surroundings.'

'Answer me, damn you,' yelled Cavalerio, beating a fist against the glass.

Agathe glanced over towards the unseen occupant of the chamber, her prevarication only serving to enrage Cavalerio even more.

'Don't look away from me, girl,' he snarled. 'I am the Stormlord and you will answer me.'

'Very well, my princeps,' said Agathe. 'How much do you remember?'

He frowned, bubbles drifting upwards past his face as he sought to recall the last memory he had before waking.

The towering monster of Legio Mortis bearing down on him.

The furious beat of Victorix Magna's heart as it ruptured under the strain.

The death scream of Magos Argyre as he perished with it.

A yawning black abyss that pulled him down into darkness.

Hot, agonising pain surged in his chest as Princeps Cavalerio relived the death of his engine, weeping invisible tears in the blood-flecked suspension fluid of his amniotic tank.

2.03

Mondus Occulum, the jewel of the northern forges, most valued and most industrious of weapon shops. Greater even than the Olympica Fossae assembly yards, only Lukas Chrom's Mondus Gamma facilities replicated the work of the Fabricator Locum's mighty forge, but even his great forge could not match its output.

Covering hundreds of thousands of square kilometres between the domed mountains of Tharsis Tholus and Ceraunius Tholus, Kane's forge complex was a magnificent, monstrous hinterland of hive-smelteries, weapon shops, armouries, refineries, ore silos, fabrication hangars and industrial stacks.

Numerous sub-hives, Uranius, Rhabon and Labeatis being the greatest, towered over the production facilities, the sinks and towering hab blocks home to the millions of adepts, menials, labourers and muscle that drove the machines of the northern forge.

Like most forges of Mars, the iron-skinned manufactora of Mondus Gamma were geared for war. The conquest of the galaxy demanded weapons and ammunition in quantities unknown in earlier ages of the galaxy, and the hammer of beating iron and the milling of copper jackets was unceasing.

In the collapsed caldera of Uranius Patera, gigantic Tsiolkovsky towers lifted thousands of cargo containers from the supply yards into fat-bellied mass conveyers in geosynchronous orbit, ready to be transported to war zones flung out across the Imperium. Each tower was like an impossibly thick, pollarded tree, yet rendered slender by their height as they vanished into the poisonous, striated clouds that pressed down on the forge.

Both Mondus Occulum and Mondus Gamma in the south were facilities geared for war, but it was a specific branch of warriors to whom the industry of these forges was dedicated: the Astartes.

Crafted within these forges were the guns and blades wielded by the Emperor's most terrifying warriors in the prosecution of his grand dream, fabricated by the most skilled adepts and warranted never to fail by the Fabricator Locum himself. The battle plate of the Astartes was painstakingly wrought upon the anvils of master metal-smiths augmented with the highest specifications of manual dexterity and tolerances.

Boltguns, lascannons, missile launchers and every other weapon in the Astartes inventory was produced here, the martial power of the Legions first taking shape in the sweating, red-lit halls of Mondus Occulum. Armoured vehicles rumbled from assembly lines housed in vast, vaulted hangars and entire city-sized regions were dedicated to the production of unimaginable quantities of bolter ammunition.

But Mondus Occulum did not simply gird the Astartes for war with weapons and armour; it was also a place where minds were honed. Astartes warriors deemed to have an affinity with the mysteries of technology were permitted to study the ways of the machine under the tutelage of its master adepts. Fabricator Locum Kane himself had trained the finest of them: T'Kell of the Salamanders, Gebren of the Iron Hands and Polonin of the Ultramarines, warriors who would take what they had learned back to their Legions and instruct their neophytes.

Mondus Occulum, beloved of Mars, the jewel of the northern forges. Most valued and most industrious of weapon shops. Domain of the Fabricator Locum of Mars, the man second only to the ruler of Mars himself. And correctly one of the few forges of Mars to have avoided outright collapse.

Flanked by a chittering retinue of noospherically-modified servitors with blank, golden facemasks, harried calculus-logi and a number of specialised data scrubbers whose fear was evident in the harsh binary blurts of cant passing between them, Fabricator Locum Kane sought to stay calm by immersing himself in thoughts of the mundane as he passed beneath the gilded archway that led to the armourium.

Beyond his forge, events of a great and terrible nature were unfolding, but for now, for this moment, he concentrated on keeping the processes of his own forge working as normally as possible in the face of the devastation.

The cavernous chamber beyond the arch was brightly lit, its roof hundreds of metres above him and its far end lost to perspective. Loader servitors and whining elevators carried racks of Astartes battle plate, stacking them in metal-skinned containers arranged along the height of the walls and in long rows that stretched off into the distance.

Hundreds of quality-checking adepts moved through the chamber, hard-plugging in to each container and checking the measured readings of each suit of armour with previously inloaded specifications. Only rarely would armour produced at Mondus Occulum fail to meet Kane's necessarily high tolerances, an occasion that would result in a thorough investigation as to the cause of the defect. Such defects would not be replicated, and those whose laxity had allowed it in the first place would be punished.

Only once every suit had been checked and certified battle-ready would it be shipped to Uranius Patera and the orbital elevators. Warranted never to fail was a promise Fabricator Locum Kane took seriously, even now.

Especially now.

Kane took a deep breath, inhaling and sorting the chemical scent of the air before turning to his magos-apprenta. 'Can you smell that, Lachine?'

'Indeed, my lord,' replied Lachine, using his fleshvoice in emulation of his master. The boy's voice was nasal and unpleasant, and the sooner he was augmented with a vocaliser the better, thought Kane. 'Calcined aluminium oxide, a lapping powder that can reduce lapping and polishing time of armour by at least twenty per cent and which is particularly effective on hard materials, such as silicon and hardened steel. Also, microcrystalline wax and dilute acetic acid.'

Kane shook his head and placed a hand on Lachine's shoulder. The boy was much shorter than Kane and his demeanour entirely literal, a useful trait in an apprenta in terms of efficiency and work, but a frustrating one for conversation.

'No, Lachine, I mean what the smells represent.'

'Represent? Query: I do not understand your contention that odour is a signifier.'

'No? Then you are missing out, Lachine,' said Kane. 'You register the chemical components. I, on the other hand, register the emotional ones. To me, the gentle, reassuring smell of lapping powder, polish and oil represents stability and order, the certainty that we have played our part in ensuring that the Emperor's warriors are equipped for battle with the best armour and weapons we can provide.'

'I see, my lord,' said Lachine but Kane knew he did not.

'At times such as this, I find such things a comfort,' explained Kane. 'A great factory with the machinery all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity, and with its workers all driven by one impulse, and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force the galaxy knows. I have rarely seen the face of an adept in the action of creation that was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.'

Kane paused as a lifter-servitor passed, carrying a rack of gleaming, freshly-dipped suits of battle plate. The brutish monster was all muscles, pistons and gene-bulked torso, and it effortlessly bore the heavy weight of the armour in its hydraulically clawed fists. Each suit shone silver, the metal and ceramite unpainted and left for each Legion to adorn with its own colours.

'Like knights from a bygone age of Terra,' said Kane, setting off along the serried ranks of thousands upon thousands of suits of armour contained within the chamber. 'A byword for honour, duty and courage.'

'My lord?'

Kane gestured towards the armour with a dramatic sweep of his hand. 'This armour is a resource more precious than the wealth of worlds, Lachine. On most days it gives me great satisfaction to know how much the Astartes depend on us. I can normally lose myself in this place.'

He saw Lachine about to speak and said, 'Not literally, of course. I look at the sheer volume of armour stored here and, even though none of these suits are occupied by one of the Emperor's finest, I am still awed by the power of the Astartes and take solace that we are protected by such awesome heroes.'

'Conclusion: your words lead me to infer that on this day you do not take the same satisfaction you would normally.'

'Indeed I do not, Lachine. Despite my attempts to immerse myself in the daily tasks of the forge, I find my thoughts returning to the chaos that has engulfed our beloved world over the last few weeks.'

Beginning on the day the freakish and unnatural storms had broken over the faraway peak of Olympus Mons and the devastating machine plague had wreaked havoc across Mars, an epidemic of riots, suicides and murders had swept through Mondus Occulum, claiming thousands of lives and, more importantly, doing untold damage to the production facilities.

Scores of factories and weapon shops had been destroyed, burned to the ground or smashed beyond repair in the whipping, shuddering waves of panic and psychosis that had swept through the habs and factories like contagious lunacy.

The forge marshals had been unable to cope with the paroxysms of violence and, though it pained him to do so, Kane had ordered them to withdraw and allow the rioters to run their course.

'Who would have thought such trouble could have been touched off by a freak weather system over three thousand kilometres away?' he said.

'Studies by Magos Cantore have shown that uncomfortably cold weather can stimulate aggressiveness and a willingness to take risks, while apathy prevails in the heat,' said Lachine. 'Additional: temperature has previously been shown to affect mood, which in turn affects behaviour, with higher temperature or barometric pressure related to higher mood, better memory, and broadened cognitive style. Humidity, temperature and hours of exposure to sunshine have the greatest effect on mood, though Cantore believes humidity to be the most significant predictor in regression and canonical correlation analysis. Implications for the climate control of forges and subsequent worker performance are discussed in detail in the study's conclusion. Would you like me to summarise them?'

'In the name of the Omnissiah, please don't,' said Kane, striding onwards into the depths of the armorium. Lachine and his retinue struggled to match his long, purposeful stride.

As the panting Lachine drew alongside him, Kane said, 'Certainly, its absurd to believe that a meteorological phenomenon, even one so fierce, could affect the psyches of so many, yet the evidence before us is hard to ignore. However, the damage was not restricted just to the cognitive processes of the forge's population.'

That fact troubled him more than any other.

As the storm raged over Olympus Mons, the vox-lines and data highways of Mars had swarmed with screaming, shrieking packets of corrupted data that sliced into the delicate systems that governed almost every aspect of the workings of Mondus Occulum.

The outlying forge cogitators and logic engines had clogged with corrupt data, howling ghosts of sourceless machine-noise and dangerous code packets of infected algorithms that many of the most advanced aegis protocols were helpless to defeat.

Only Kane's swift action to shut down the I/O highways and the fact that the vast majority of his systems had recently been upgraded to take advantage of Koriel Zeth's revolutionary system of noospheric data transference had spared them the worst of the attack, for an attack it surely had been.

'How much longer do the code-scrubbers need before they will have my system cleaned out?' he asked.

'Current estimates range from six full rotations to thirty.'

'That's a wide range. Can't they narrow their estimation?'

'Apparently the corrupt code is proving to be most resilient to their efforts,' explained Lachine. 'Each portion of circuitry that is certified purged soon develops faulty lines of code at a geometric rate once again. They dare not reconnect any system touched by the polluted algorithms for fear of re-infection.'

'Have they identified its point of origin?'

'Not with any certainty, though the infection of systems appears to be spreading outwards from the forge of the Fabricator General, suggesting that it was the first to suffer.'

'Or where it was released,' muttered Kane. Despite repeated attempts to communicate with Kelbor-Hal, every transmission had been rebuffed by squalling code screams like barking dogs or was simply ignored.

'Query: you believe this scrapcode to have been released into the Martian systems on purpose?' Even the normally logical and literal Lachine could not keep an emotional response from his voice at the notion that the scrapcode had been unleashed deliberately.

Kane cursed himself for his verbal slip and shrugged.

'It's a possibility,' he admitted, keeping his tone light. He didn't particularly want to voice his suspicions to Lachine. His apprenta was loyal, but he was naive, and Kane knew that information could be thieved by any number of means from supposedly secure sources.

No, the less Lachine knew of Kane's suspicions the better.

According to the code-scrubbers, the scrapcode had attempted to shut down the vox network and defence protocols that protected his forge and then release the tension in the Tsiolkovsky towers' guy wires. Kane had shut off the links between Mondus Occulum and the rest of Mars in an instant, leaving them floundering in the dark, but safe from further attack.

Even communications off-world had become next to impossible thanks to a sourceless backwash of psychic interference. Kane had only been able to maintain contact between the forge of Ipluvien Maximal and the Magma City of Adept Zeth thanks to the noosphere.

The news coming from both was neither reassuring nor particularly illuminating.

Both adepts had suffered similar outbreaks of inexplicable violence and madness among their populace, though only Maximal had experienced serious machine failures, losing three of his prized reactors to critical mass overloads. Zeth had spoken of a failed experiment that had seen virtually all of her psykers dead, no doubt related to the psychic interference surrounding Mars.

As if things weren't bad enough, Maximal went on to tell of fragmentary communications he had inloaded from the expedition fleets that spoke of an equally terrible catastrophe in the Istvaan system.

Details were sketchy and Maximal had not wanted to speculate without firmer information, but it appeared that a dreadful incident had occurred around the third planet, which was now said to be a blasted, ashen wasteland.

Kane knew of only one weapon that could reduce a planet to such a wretched, hellish state in so short a time.

Had the Warmaster unleashed the Life Eater or was this the desperate last act of a defeated foe? Maximal's sources had no answer to that, but claimed that the Astartes had taken fearful casualties.

Whether they had suffered as a result of enemy action or a terrible accident of friendly fire was unclear, but for Astartes to suffer any loss on such a scale was almost impossible to imagine.

Of all of them, Maximal's vox-systems had suffered least in the deluge of unclean code, and he was even now attempting to restore communications with agencies beyond the surface of Mars for further information.

Via secure noospheric links, all three adepts expressed their certainty that the infection of the Martian systems bore all the hallmarks of a pre-emptive strike, but without more solid data, there was nothing they could do but strengthen their defences in case of further assault.

Kane had heard the fear in Maximal's ridiculously rarefied voice and despised him for it. Maximal was not an easy adept to like and Kane considered him to be little more than an archivist rather than an innovator. Koriel Zeth, on the other hand, had spoken boldly of resisting any follow-up attacks and of how she had despatched envoys to allied warrior orders of Titans and Knights to secure their assistance.

With Mars under attack from an unknown foe, it was time to gather one's friends close.

Kane respected Zeth, for she reminded him of a younger version of himself, an adept unafraid to push the boundaries of the known. To Kane, Zeth represented all that was good about the Mechanicum, an adept who possessed a proper reverence for the past and what earlier pioneers had developed that meshed with an unashamed hunger to build upon that knowledge to reach still greater heights.

An ancient alchemist and scientist of Terra had once said that he had seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants. That perfectly applied to Adept Zeth, and Kane knew that if anyone was going to advance the cause of science and reason in the Imperium it was her.

Emboldened by that thought, Kane watched as huge, tracked haulers lifted sealed containers of Astartes weapons and armour for transport to the orbital elevators of Uranius Patera.

'Come, Lachine,' he said. 'Even during a crisis, the work of Mondus Occulum must continue.'

Grey dust, like ashen bone, billowed around the legs of the two Knights as they loped along the edges of the Aganippe Fossae, the long trench that carved into the plains west of the towering form of Arsia Mons.

Leopold Cronus led the way in Pax Mortis, with Raf Maven following behind in the newly repaired Equitos Bellum. Cronus set a brisk striding pace, and Maven had to work hard to keep up with him, for Equitos Bellum was skittish, its controls tight, and the Manifold willfully resisted him at every turn.

It knows the thing that hurt it is still out there, thought Maven, angling his course to follow Cronus and the deep canyon. Dust clouds obscured the view from his cockpit, but there was little to see in this region and he was piloting via the Manifold anyway. The toxic deserts of the pallidus stretched out to the west and south, and the northern sub-hives between here and Ipluvien Maximal's forge were little more than black smudges of hanging smoke and fear to the north.

The Knights followed the course of the chasm towards the Median Bridge, a section of collapsed rock where they could cross before turning eastwards towards their chapter house within the Arsia Chasmata.

'How's it doing?' asked Cronus over the vox-link.

'It's hard work,' admitted Maven. 'It keeps pulling at the controls, but there's no sense to it. Each time I compensate, it returns on the opposite side a moment later.'

'It will take time to readjust,' said Cronus. 'The entire link assembly had to be rebuilt.'

'I know, but it feels stronger than that.'

'Stronger how? What do you mean?'

'Like it's trying to guide me,' said Maven, at a loss how else to explain it. 'Guide you? To where?'

'I don't know, but it's like… like something's pulling at me too.'

Maven heard Cronus sigh over the vox and wished he had something more solid to offer his friend by way of an explanation. All he had was a gut feeling and the firmly-held conviction that his mount knew better than he what needed to be done.

Their deployment had begun three days ago, when they left the chapter house in a fanfare of cheers, squires' trumpets, blaring warhorns and waving cobalt banners. Equitos Bellum marched out, and the brothers of the Knights of Taranis had come to watch it walk once more. For a mount to have returned from the verge of destruction was no small matter and the occasion had to be marked.

Like most of the warrior orders of Tharsis, the Knights of Taranis had been on high alert since the chaos that had engulfed Mars began. Thanks to the noospheric links installed by Adept Zeth, the halls of Taranis had not suffered as horrifically as many others had, though the enginseers had been forced to order an emergency shutdown of the chapter house's main reactor after a fragment of scrapcode attempted to disengage its coolant protocols.

That speedy response had saved the Order of Taranis from a nuclear holocaust, but until the code-scrubbers could purge the corrupted systems, those Knight machines without full power cells would not be able to recharge.

Nor had that been the worst of the damage. Much to Lord Verticorda's anguish, the data looms of the order's librarium had been corrupted beyond repair, taking with them a roll of honour and battle stretching back a thousand years and more.

At the request of Adept Zeth, Lords Caturix and Verticorda had ordered the Knights of Taranis to ride from their chapter house in defence of Mars and the Magma City. Rumour had it that Zeth had also despatched emissaries to Lord Cavalerio of Tempestus to petition their engines to walk, but no one knew what answer she had received.

With several machines powerless to ride until the reactor was repaired, the Knights of Taranis were forced to operate in teams of two instead of three to cover the scale of their deployment. Old Stator had marched out alongside Brother Gentran, a rider newly-elevated from the Errantry, and Maven had been surprised to find that he missed the flinty presence of his preceptor.

Maven and Cronus had ridden east, following a patrol circuit that carried them clockwise around the rumpled skirts of the ancient volcano, before turning to follow the line of the Oti Fossae southwards. As night fell on the second day of their ride, they turned west towards the Magma City to refuel and recharge before continuing on their patrol circuit.

The forge of Koriel Zeth never failed to amaze Maven, glowing like an ember in the distance while the skies above seethed with orange light as though the clouds themselves were afire. Riding closer, lava-filled aqueducts had shone like threads of gold as they carried molten rock from the top of Aetna's Dam, the monolithic structure that formed the entirety of the volcano's southern flank, to the magma lagoon surrounding the city.

Towering walls of ceramite and adamantium ringed the enormous city, and the light of the planet's lifeblood dispelled the darkness as the Knights marched along the mighty, statue-lined Typhon Causeway towards the Vulkan Gate.

Silver and black spires jutted over the walls like metallic teeth, and only after convoluted binaric interrogation by the gate's defences had they been allowed inside. They had stayed within the circuit of the walls just long enough for their mounts' power cells to be brought back to maximum charge before riding out.

The two Knights had continued on their patrol circuit of the enormous volcano, skirting the Magma City's port facilities where millions of tonnes of war materiel was ferried into the hungry bellies of mass-conveyers hanging low in the crowded skies. No sooner had they left the smoking grandeur of Zeth's city than Maven had felt Equitos Bellum pulling at him, an insistent urge that nagged at his hindbrain and sent painful skewers of pain into his mind whenever he resisted.

With their course soon to carry them eastwards towards home, the pull was getting stronger, and Maven gripped the controls tighter as he felt a building ache behind his eyes. He felt every one of his hard-plugs scratching with irritation, as though Equitos Bellum was trying to dislodge him like a wild colt.

'What's the matter with you?' he hissed.

As if in answer, a ghostly flare on the auspex spiked to the south, and Maven flinched as a surge of recognition pulsed in his mind. The image vanished almost as soon as it appeared and he wasn't even sure he'd seen it, but for the briefest instant it had looked like a dreadfully familiar spider-like pattern of electromagnetic energy.

Maven drew his mount to a halt, feeling the pain behind his eyes ease as he did so. The tall machine's hydraulics hissed as it sank down onto its haunches.

'Cronus, wait!' he called, rotating the Knight's upper body with a deft movement of the controls. There was nothing to see here, just bone white ash and dust whipped in from the southern pallidus. He heard the relaxing groan of metal as Equitos Bellum settled, feeling the tension in its limbs and the restless hunger for vengeance burning in its core.

'What is it?' replied Cronus, and Maven read the telltales of his brother's machine assuming a war posture through the Manifold. 'What do you see?'

'I don't know,' admitted Maven. 'I don't think there's actually anything out there, but Equitos Bellum's got the scent of something.'

'Did you get an auspex return?'

'Sort of, maybe… I don't know,' said Maven. 'It was like a ghost image or something. It was just like the energy signature I saw right before the attack on Maximal's reactor.'

Pax Mortis rode alongside him, and Maven could see Leopold Cronus through the armaglass canopy. His brother looked unconvinced, but not yet ready to write off Maven's - and Equitos Bellum's - instincts for danger.

'Send it over,' ordered Cronus. 'The auspex log for the last few minutes.'

Maven nodded, exloading the data from his auspex panel to Cronus's machine in a brief data squirt. As he waited for Cronus to review the data, he cast his gaze out into the depths of the pallidus.

The ashen deserts were desolate and uninhabitable, a landscape of tortured grandeur rendered barren and toxic by rapacious over-mining and unthinking plundering of the resources buried beneath the Martian soil. Pollutants blown in from the equatorial refinery belt carpeted the barren, scarred rock, making it a treacherous landscape of sand-covered crevasses and sinkholes.

Nothing lived in the pallidus, yet Maven found himself unaccountably drawn to grip the controls of his mount and ride south into the wasteland. His power cells were fully charged and he had more than enough reserves of nutrients and water to last him for weeks if need be.

His hands twitched at the controls and he felt the heart of his mount respond to his desire. It goaded him with warlike whispers and an insistent pressure at the back of his mind. His lip curled into a snarl as he thought of hunting the monstrous, dead thing that had almost killed him.

It was out there, and Equitos Bellum knew it. He could feel the certainty of that fact in every molecule of his being. The ghost image had been a reminder of his duty to his mount.

'There's nothing here,' said Cronus, breaking into his thoughts. 'Auspex track is clean.'

'I know,' said Maven, with calm, cold certainty. 'There's nothing nearby.'

'Then why have we stopped?'

'Because Equitos Bellum is telling me where I need to go—'

'Go?' asked Cronus. 'What are you talking about? The only place we need to go is across the Median Bridge and back to the chapter house.'

'No,' insisted Maven. 'It's out there. The thing that tried to kill us. It's in the south, I know it.'

'How can you know it?' demanded Cronus. 'There's nothing on the auspex. You said so yourself.'

'I know that, Leo, but I saw what I saw. Equitos Bellum can feel it and I trust its instincts.'

'And what? You're going to go after it on your own?'

'If I have to,' said Maven.

'Don't be foolish,' warned Cronus. 'Caturix will have your spurs if you do this.'

'He can have them,' said Maven, powering up and raising the Knight to its full height once more. 'I need to do this. Equitos Bellum needs this if it's ever going to be whole again.'

'You're willing to risk your spurs by going off-mission on what, a hunch?'

'It's more than that, Leo,' said Maven. 'I know it's out there and I'm going after it whether you like it or not.'

Once again, Maven heard Cronus sigh, and though he hated to abandon his friend he knew he had no choice. Equitos Bellum would give him no peace until they had been avenged.

'Very well,' said Cronus. 'Where is it? Give me a heading.'

'Leo? You're coming with me?' asked Maven.

'This thing, whatever it is, already got the better of you once before,' said Cronus. 'So, logically, you're going to need my help if you're going to take it on again.'

'You're a true friend,' said Maven, so very proud of his brother.

'Shut up and let's go before I see sense and change my mind.'

Maven smiled. 'Follow me,' he said, turning his mount and riding into the pallidus.

The hunt was on and Equitos Bellum surged with wounded pride.

Maven welcomed it.

Dalia awoke with a scream, her hand clutching her chest, hyperventilating as the fragments of the darkness within her skull threatened to spill out and consume her. Serpentine shapes lurked in the shadows, and Dalia hugged the sheets close to her body as she heard the hiss of a draconic breath drawn at the beginning of the universe and saw the gleam of teeth in ever-widening jaws.

A voice in the darkness spoke her name.

Even with her eyes shut, she could see him, the hooded man with the wild eyes and the mark of the dragon burning beneath his skin. Its silver fire was a web of light within his flesh.

She forced her eyes open as the light levels in the hab grew from nightlight to full illumination. Beside her, Caxton stirred, half asleep as he fumbled with the lumen controls.

'What… what's the matter?' he asked groggily.

Dalia's eyes flickered to the corners of the hab, where of course there were no serpentine predators lurking in the shadows to devour her and no hooded man with glittering mercury for blood. She saw a gunmetal grey footlocker overflowing with clothing, the small table strewn with machine parts, and oil-stained walls hung with thin sheets of paper covered in scrawled diagrams. A dripping tap echoed in the ablutions cubicle and an uneaten meal lay in its foil wrapper next to an empty water bottle.

She focused on those simple, domestic items, their familiarity an anchor to the real world and not the realm of dreams and nightmares, the world of dragons and hooded men.

'Are you allright?' asked Caxton, sitting up in bed and putting his arm around her. The haptic implants in his fingertips were cold against her bare skin and she shivered. He mistook it for fear and pulled her close. 'I'm here, Dalia. There's nothing to worry about. You just had a nightmare.'

Ever since waking from her coma, Dalia had discovered that she could not bear to be alone. Sleep would not come, and a gnawing terror of sinking down into darkness for all eternity would open like a yawning chasm of emptiness within her. She feared she might never emerge from it should she fall in.

When she had confided this to Caxton, he had offered to stay with her, and though she recognised male desire in the offer, she recognised her own need as well. His moving into her hab unit had seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

They sat there for several minutes, Caxton rocking her gently and Dalia letting him.

'Was it the same as before?' he asked.

She nodded. 'The dragon and the hooded man.'

'Every night the same dream,' he said in wonder. 'What do you think it means?'

Dalia pulled free from his embrace and turned her head to look directly at him.

'It means we need to leave.'

'I'll wake the others,' he said, seeing the determination in her eyes. She leaned in and kissed him. 'Do it quickly,' she said.

2.04

The Magma City never slept, its industry continuing through every hour of the day and night. Despite the crowds of robed adepts, menials and workers that filled its streets, Dalia still felt acutely vulnerable. Their small group was clothed in nondescript robes, a mix of reds and browns that marked them as low-grade forge workers. A common sight on the thoroughfares of Adept Zeth's forge, yet each of them felt as though every eye was upon them.

The constant thrum and low vibration that permeated every surface of the city was more pronounced on the streets, and Dalia wondered if they were being watched even now. Throne knew how many different ways there were of monitoring a person's whereabouts, biometric readings, facial recognition, genetic markers, spy-skulls or even good old-fashioned eyes.

'Lift your head up, girl,' said Zouche. 'You look like you're up to no good with your head down like that.'

'We are up to no good,' pointed out Severine. 'We're leaving the forge without permission. I said this was a bad idea.'

'You didn't have to come,' shot back Caxton.

Severine shot him a withering glance and said, 'I needed to come,' as though that should settle the matter. Dalia listened to them bicker, recognising the fear behind it. She understood that fear, for each of them was a member of the Cult Mechanicum, augmented in ways both subtle and gross, and each stood to lose a great deal should they be discovered.

'We have to do this,' said Dalia. 'Whatever we unlocked with the Akashic reader, it's hidden in the Noctis Labyrinthus. We have to find out what it is.'

'You mean you have to find out what it is,' said Zouche. 'I'm quite happy not knowing.'

'Then why are you here?'

'You said you needed my help,' said the short machinist, and Dalia could have kissed him.

She took a breath and lifted her head. 'Zouche is right. We shouldn't look as though we've anything to hide. I mean, look around us, the place is as busy now as it is any other time of the day.'

Blue-tinted lumen globes sputtered and fizzed atop black poles, their glass reflecting the golden-orange glow from the clouds. Soaring above them, higher even than the silver pyramid of Zeth's forge, was the dark, mountainous shadow of Arsia Mons. The volcano's side had been quarried away five hundred years ago and replaced with the gargantuan structure of Aetna's Dam, its monstrous, cyclopean scale almost impossible to comprehend.

Dalia recognised the name it bore, which had belonged to a legendary fire goddess of a long dead volcano that rose from the Mediterranean dust bowl of Terra. It was fitting that the name should be appropriated for a rekindled volcano on Mars.

As it had been when Dalia had first arrived on Mars, the Magma City thrived and pulsed with activity, with its inhabitants making their way to and fro on foot and by any number of bizarre mechanical conveyances. Servo-skulls of gold, silver and bone darted through the air, each on an errand for its master, and Dalia wondered which of them served Adept Zeth.

'It may be busy,' said Caxton, 'but if any of the Protectors realise we shouldn't be on shift, we'll be in real trouble.'

'Then best we don't attract their attention by standing around yapping like stray dogs, eh?' said Zouche. 'Come on, the mag-lev transit hub is just ahead.'

They followed Zouche, trying to affect an air of nonchalance and give the impression that they had every reason to be there, though Dalia suspected they weren't succeeding too well. She could feel sweat running between her shoulder blades and fought the urge to scratch an itch on the back of her leg.

She felt great affection for her friends, knowing that she wouldn't have had the strength or courage to make the journey on her own. She had told them she needed them, which was true, but not for the reasons any of them might expect. Their technical skills would no doubt be useful along the way, but she needed them with her so the dark and terrifyingly lonely void that lurked behind her eyes every time she closed them wouldn't overwhelm her.

She knew Caxton was with her because he was in love with her, and Zouche had come because he was about as honest as a person could be. He had said he would come and he had. He lived his life by doing as he said he would do, which even Dalia knew was all too rare a trait in humanity.

Dalia didn't know why Severine had come, since the girl clearly didn't want to be there and was terrified of losing her status as a Mechanicum draughter. Guilt was what Dalia suspected drove Severine to make this journey, guilt for what they had allowed to happen to Jonas Milus. It was a reason Dalia was uncomfortably aware played no small part in her own determination to discover what lay beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus.

Only Mellicin had not come with them, and Dalia was sad not to have her logical presence with them right now, though that was, she supposed, exactly why she wasn't there. Caxton had gathered them all in Zouche's hab, a sterile and functional chamber that reflected the machinist's austere, no-nonsense character. The only concession to decoration was a small silver effigy of a lighthouse that sat in a corner with a slow-burning candle smouldering before it.

All of them had answered Caxton's summons: Severine looking rumpled and irritable, Zouche as though he had been awake all along and had simply been waiting for them, while Mellicin looked as calm as Dalia could ever remember seeing her.

With everyone gathered, Dalia had outlined the substance and unnatural regularity of her dreams, the imagery and the feeling that she was being summoned to the Labyrinth of Night.

'Summoned by what?' asked Zouche.

'I don't know,' admitted Dalia. 'This… Dragon, whatever it is.'

'Don't you remember the stories?' asked Severine. 'The dragons ate fair maidens.'

'Then you and Mellicin will be all right,' quipped Caxton, wishing he hadn't when Dalia stared at him in annoyance.

'I had the dream again tonight,' said Dalia. 'The same as before, but it felt stronger, more urgent. I think it's telling me that it's time to go.'

'Now?' asked Severine. 'It's the middle of the night.'

'Kind of appropriate then, eh?' said Zouche. 'We are going to the Labyrinth of Night after all.'

They all looked at each other then, and Dalia could sense their hesitation.

'I need your help. I can't do this alone,' she said, hating the pleading note in her voice.

'No need to ask twice, Dalia,' said Zouche, picking up the silver lighthouse figurine and tucking it into his robes. 'I'll come.'

'And me,' said Severine, though she didn't make eye contact.

'Mellicin?' asked Caxton. 'What about you? You in?'

The stern matronly woman who had held them together and made them work better in a team than they ever could have managed alone, shook her head. She gripped Dalia's hand and said, 'I can't go with you, Dalia, I have to stay. Someone has to finish what we've begun here. Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to go with you, but I'm too old and too set in my ways to go gallivanting around Mars chasing dreams and visions and mysteries. My place is here in the forge. I'm sorry.'

Dalia was disappointed, but she nodded. 'I understand, Mel. And don't worry about us. We'll be back soon, I promise.'

'I know you will. And don't call me Mel ever again,' said Mellicin.

They laughed and said their goodbyes before making their way towards a journey into the unknown and an uncertain future.

So lost was Dalia in her memory of saying goodbye to Mellicin that she bumped into a passing adept, who stared at her with amber eyes from behind a silver mask. He blurted a hash of irritated binary and Dalia shrank from the force of his utterance.

'Many apologies, Adept Lascu,' she said, reading his identity in the noospheric information swirling above him before remembering that she shouldn't be able to read such things without modification.

The adept either didn't notice or believed she already knew him, and passed on his way with a final canted burst of annoyance. Dalia let out a pent-up breath and turned as the sleeve of her robe was tugged.

'If you're quite finished?' said Caxton, looking in alarm at the adept's retreating back.

'Yes, sorry,' she said.

'The mag-lev hub is just ahead,' said Zouche, pointing to a bronze archway through which hundreds of people were passing back and forth. Dalia experienced a moment of sickening realisation when they reached the archway and she saw the wide steps descending hundreds of metres into the bedrock of Mars.

'They're going to have to go below the level of the magma?' she asked.

'Of course,' said Caxton. 'The mag-lev can't exactly go through the lava now can it?'

'No, I suppose not,' said Dalia, wishing she hadn't said anything.

Caxton pulled her on and she quelled her mounting panic as they began their journey downwards. Sizzling lumen strips that flickered and hurt Dalia's eyes illuminated their route along a tunnel thronged with workers making their way to and from their shifts. They marched like automatons - one side ascending, the other descending - all in perfect unison towards or from the metropolis above.

Zouche forged them a path downwards with his squat frame and robust language, and anyone who objected to either soon bit their tongue at the sight of his thunderous stare and bunched fists.

Eventually they reached the bottom, the transit station itself, a gigantic hangar with a colossal vaulted ceiling. There seemed to be no order to the movement of the packed mass of people, just heaving bodies that moved according to tidal patterns rather than with any purpose.

Robed Protectors bearing crackling weapon-staves and the four-by-four number grid symbol of Adept Zeth policed the energetic scrum of workers, and Dalia tried to avoid looking at them for fear of attracting their attention. Servo skulls bobbed overhead, and grating binaric code spilled from vox-plates set into the walls, announcing departures and arrivals and warning travellers to beware of the void between mag-lev and platform.

'Now where?' asked Dalia, unable to make sense of the overlaid binary instructions blaring from the vox.

'This way,' said Zouche pushing through the crowds. 'It looks harder than it is, but after you've ridden the mag-lev once it's easy to find your way around.'

'I'll take your word for it,' said Dalia, taking Caxton and Severine's hands like children on a scholam outing as they set off after him.

Zouche led the way through a confusing series of ceramic-tiled tunnels until they stood on a crowded platform with hundreds of tired-looking workers.

Distorted, wavering blurts of code fragments coughed from battered vox-amps set in wooden boxes mounted on the ceiling, and even Zouche shrugged when Dalia looked at him for an explanation.

'I didn't get a word of that,' said Zouche.

'It said the next mag-lev will be delayed by two hundred and seventy-five seconds,' said a powerful voice behind them.

Dalia flinched at the sound, recognising the harsh, metallic rasp of a human voice issuing from behind a bronze mask.

She turned and looked up into a pair of glowing green eyes.

'Greetings, Dalia Cythera,' said Rho-mu 31.

The enemy Reaver was burning, the top portion of its carapace blown away by Cavalerio's blastgun after a punishing barrage from the Vulcan had stripped it of its voids. He felt the heat build in his left arm as the weapon recharged, and a clatter in his right as the autoloader recycled the mega bolter to fire again.

The enemy engine toppled backwards, flattening an ore silo and sending up a blizzard of flame and smoke. Crushed rockcrete dust billowed from its demise and even as Cavalerio exulted in the kill, he knew the other Reaver was still out there, lurking behind the burning ruins of the refinery, using the smoke and heat to mask its reactor bloom.

'Moderati, get me a mass reading!' he ordered in a squirt of binary.

'Yes, princeps.'

Information flooded him through the Manifold, a hundred different stimuli collected from the mighty engine's myriad surveyors: heat, mass, motion, radiation, vibration and shield harmonics. Everything combined to paint a world more real to Cavalerio than reality itself.

He drank the liquid data down, swallowing and digesting it in a heartbeat. His awareness of his surroundings bloomed and he saw the enemy Reaver manoeuvring around the refinery, smashing its way through the walls and roof beams of the nearby steelworks.

A flicker of heat and mass tugged at his awareness and he felt the stealthy approach of the enemy Warhound before he saw it.

'Steersman, reverse pace, flank speed! Heading two-seven-zero!'

A Warlord Titan was not built for rapid course changes, but the steersman was good and the engine obeyed with commendable speed. The building beside Cavalerio exploded into a mass of shredded girders, torn concrete slabs and sheet metal roofing. Clouds of vaporised rockcrete billowed, but Cavalerio's engine-sight could penetrate it without difficulty.

He saw the Warhound, a graceful loping predator of red and silver, dart from the shadows of a collapsed forge-hangar, its turbos blitzing with hard light. Cavalerio felt the impacts on his shields, but its angle of fire was poor and most of the shots were void-skidding.

he canted.

'Yes, princeps.'

'Moderati, firing solution!'

The Warhound was nimble, but it had struck too soon, and without the shock value of its turbo lasers impacting on its target's shields it was vulnerable. Data inloaded from the moderati's station, and Cavalerio saw the vectors of fire slide into his mind at the speed of thought. He felt the wordless bray of the gun-servitor's acknowledgement and opened fire.

A sheeting storm of explosive rounds roared from Cavalerio's mega bolter, obscuring the Warhound in a blizzard of detonations and flaring shreds of discharging voids. The Warhound staggered, pushed back against the brick walls of a weapon shop. Stone and steel tumbled to the ground, but Cavalerio knew the enemy engine wasn't out of the fight yet.

'Steersman, move in! Moderati, arm missiles. Sensori, where's that Reaver?'

'Moving in, aye!'

'Missiles arming!'

'Reaver still closing, princeps. Six hundred metres, bearing zero-six-three.'

Cavalerio's engine closed the gap between it and the Warhound. He had to kill it before the Reaver was in a position to help. Individually, neither of the enemy machines were a match for his Warlord, but working together, they could potentially bring him down if he were not careful.

The Warhound swayed as it picked itself up, its weapon limbs shaking like a dog climbing from the water. Its shields burbled and sparked, and Cavalerio read a flaring convergence of energy gaps clustered around the engine's hip.

Information updates sluiced around him and he updated his situational awareness, feeling the danger of the closing Reaver and knowing he didn't have much time.

'Moderati! As soon as that Reaver comes into view, hit its upper carapace with a barrage from the carapace launcher. Three missile spread, five second intervals.'

'Yes, princeps.'

'Gun-servitor Hellas-88, slave weapon to my command.'

The implanted servitor wordlessly acknowledged his order, and Cavalerio felt the reassuring weight and industrial motion of the mega bolter as though it were part of his flesh. It was reckless to take command of the weapon from the servitor, who could fire it far more effectively than he could, but to make this kill, he wanted to feel the thunder.

Cavalerio surrendered to the engine's killing lust, guiding it with his own need to defeat their foe. With a thought, the mega bolter engaged and sawed off a furious hurricane of shells at the staggering Warhound's wounded hip.

At the same time, he felt the juddering shoom, shoom, shoom of the missiles mounted high on his carapace leap from the launcher. The Reaver had joined the fight and he had to finish the Warhound quickly.

'Multiple impacts on enemy Reaver, princeps!'

Cavalerio noted the update, but concentrated his attention on the Warhound. Its voids had collapsed under his barrage, detonating with a blinding thunderclap. The explosion atomised one weapon arm and cracked its carapace open. Flames billowed from its rear quarter.

Still it stood, defiant as a whipped wolf.

'Arming blastgun,' intoned the Moderati. 'Plotting solution.'

'Belay that order!' cried Cavalerio, 'we'll need it for the Reaver! We close and kill it with hard rounds!'

'Incoming!' shouted the Moderati, and Cavalerio felt the blistering pain of impacts on the voids. Missiles streaked from the enemy Reaver, fired from an under-slung rocket pod, and the relentless impacts staggered his engine. Shield energy ripped away from his Warlord, and Cavalerio heard the frantic cants of the Magos as he fought to rebuild them.

The limping Warhound stood its ground before him, silhouetted in the ruins of the collapsed building, and Cavalerio was forced to admire its pilot's courage. It was doomed, yet still it fought. Its remaining gun opened fire, punishing his already weakened shields.

'Shield failure on lower quadrant!' warned the Magos. 'Critical collapse imminent!'

'Reaver closing, princeps!'

Cavalerio ignored the warnings, letting rip once more with the mega bolter. A storm of shells and pulverised rock erupted around the Warhound, driving it to its knees with the force of the impacts. Its carapace cracked open and flames sheeted upwards as the remains of the building tumbled down around it. Cavalerio kept hammering the smaller engine until it was a ruin of splintered metal and fire.

Sudden, agonising pain speared into him, and he screamed as it felt like his leg was bathed in liquid fire. His awareness snapped back into wide-spread, and he saw the looming form of the Reaver closing with him, its immense bulk smashing through the high walls of the refinery in its hunger to reach him. Its warhorn blared in triumph and its plasma blastgun was smoking from a sustained salvo. Cavalerio read the situation in a heartbeat.

It was on his exposed flank and had him dead to rights.

His shields were almost gone, the metal beneath buckled and molten.

A volley of screaming rockets slammed into him and he convulsed with psychostigmatic pain. The Manifold erupted with warnings and damage indicators.

The chin station exploded, immolating the Moderati and steersman in a hellish firestorm. The cockpit shook as more missile impacts slammed into the Warlord's mighty torso.

canted the magos unnecessarily.

'Missiles!' he yelled, knowing it was too late. 'Full spread, safeties off!'

Streaking rockets and laser fire pounded the air between the two engines as they unleashed the last of their arsenal at one another at point-blank range. Cavalerio screamed as his shields failed, feeling awful, intolerable pain as the enemy engine tore the guts from him with an unending series of missile strikes.

Bright explosions of void failure flared around him, and at last both war machines were stripped of their shields, naked and steel to steel.

Cavalerio grinned through the pain.

'Now I have you!' he roared.

With his last breath, Cavalerio unleashed the full power of the blastgun into his enemy's face and the world exploded in fire and light.

Agathe watched the last moments of the unfolding battle on the hololithic projection table, admiring the skill of the Stormlord even as his engine was destroyed. Watching the miniature holograms of the engines stomping around the artificial landscape had been thrilling, but the tension in the warriors gathered around the table was contagious.

'He's doing much better now, isn't he?' she asked.

Princeps Sharaq looked over at her, his kind eyes and cropped, salt and pepper hair at odds with the killer she knew him to be. His eyes darted to the other side of the projection table where two fellow princeps, Vlad Suzak and Jan Mordant, stood watching the simulated battle. Suzak stood ramrod straight, as if on parade, while Mordant eagerly leaned forwards with his elbow resting on the edge of the table.

'Yes, famulous, he is doing better,' said Sharaq.

'But not well enough,' put in Suzak, the straight-backed slayer of engines.

'It takes time to adjust,' said Agathe, looking at the forlorn, naked form suspended in the steel-edged amniotic tank, linked to the projection table via a host of insulated cables. 'To go from hard-plug connection to full immersion. It's not an easy transition to make.'

'No,' agreed Sharaq, 'but the point remains, the Stormlord cannot command the Legio like this. Not yet.'

Agathe pointed to the projection table. 'He took on and defeated three engines single-handedly. Doesn't that count for anything?'

'It speaks of great courage,' said Jan Mordant, looking over at Sharaq. 'Maybe we're being too cautious?'

'It speaks of recklessness,' snapped Sharaq.

'It's just a simulation, Kel,' pointed out Mordant. 'It's a whole different game when you're linked with the Manifold. We all know the risks you take in a sim aren't the ones you take when your neck's on the line.'

'I'm aware of that, Jan, but if this had been real, the Stormlord would have died and taken his engine with him. A Warlord no less.'

'But three engines, Kel…' said Mordant. 'Come on!'

Sharaq sighed. 'I understand, Jan, I really do, but you've only recently been elevated to the princepture of a Reaver from a Warhound.'

'What's that got to do with anything?'

'It means you haven't yet shed your own recklessness,' said Suzak. 'You have to think in terms other than individual heroics when you command a larger engine. You should know that, and Princeps Cavalerio should damn well know it.'

Agathe saw the flush of temper colour Jan Mordant's neck, but he controlled his anger and simply nodded. She saw his knuckles were white where they gripped the projection table.

Softening his tone, Sharaq said, 'Princeps Cavalerio should have waited for the engines of his battlegroup to take the enemy en masse. We are not in the business of futile heroics, Jan, we are in the business of destroying our foes and then bringing our engines and crews back alive.'

'So the decision stands?' asked Mordant.

Sharaq nodded. 'The decision stands. Until such time as I deem Princeps Cavalerio fit to return to active duty, I will assume command of Legio Tempestus forces on Mars.'

Mordant and Suzak nodded and saluted their new Princeps Senioris.

Agathe watched the foetal outline of Cavalerio twitch in the blood-flecked jelly of his amniotic tank. Could he hear what his warriors were saying about him?

She hoped not.

He had already suffered the pain of losing his engine. How devastating would it be to lose his Legio?

Dalia felt an icy hand clamp down on her heart at the sight of Rho-mu 31.

Her perceptions seemed to contract to a bubble of warped reality, where the world around her ceased to flow. The motion of people, the sound of the vox-system and the crackle of electricity, and the actinic reek of ozone were all held in stasis, while her personal experience spiked like an arrhythmic heartbeat.

She could feel the panic in her companions, and fought to control her breathing.

Rho-mu 31 stood immobile in front of her, his robes bright red and his body carrying the strange aroma of spoiled meat that always seemed to attend the Protectors. Silver gleamed in the shadows of his cloak where augmetic implants emerged from his flesh.

'Oh,' she managed. 'Hello.'

As far as excuses or opening gambits went, it was fairly poor.

The noise of the transit station swelled in her ears, and suddenly all she could hear was the rustle of a hundred conversations and the shuffle of a thousand feet.

'Rho-mu 31,' she said, struggling to think of something more meaningful to say and failing miserably. She felt herself looking at her feet like a naughty child.

Zouche came to her rescue, standing in front of her and craning his neck to look up at the heavily muscled and augmented Mechanicum warrior.

'Rho-mu 31 is it?' he said. 'Good to see you. We… ah… we were just taking the transit to the port facilities. Got some supplies coming in from the Jovian shipyards.'

'The port facilities?' asked Rho-mu 31.

'That's right,' added Caxton. 'We wanted to make sure they were the right ones, you know, save the stevedores the bother of getting them here and finding out they were the wrong ones. It would add days to our work, and frankly we don't have days to lose.'

Dalia closed her eyes, unable to meet Rho-mu 31's gaze as her companions told their terrible, unbelievable lies. She imagined the ground opening up and plunging her deep into the magma, or that an approaching mag-lev might fly from the rails in a cataclysmic crash.

Anything would be preferable to this excruciating feeling.

Severine joined with the others in weaving the deception, the lie growing ever more convoluted and drawing in elements and characters - many of whom she was certain didn't exist - until Dalia could stand it no longer.

'Enough!' she yelled. 'Throne, don't you realise how stupid this all sounds?'

A few heads turned at her use of the Throne as an oath, but most people kept their heads down, knowing it was not wise to attract the attention of a Mechanicum Protector unless you really had to.

The others fell silent, studiously examining the floor as though it held the key to their salvation. Dalia drew herself up to her full height, which wasn't much compared to Rho-mu 31, and looked into the glowing green lights behind his bronze mask.

'We're not going to the port,' she said. 'We're going to the Noctis Labyrinthus.'

She heard the collective intake of breath from the others and pressed on, knowing she had no choice but to tell Rho-mu 31 the truth.

'Why would you want to go to such a benighted place?' asked Rho-mu 31. 'Nothing good can come of it. Only the Cult of the Dragon is said to dwell within the Labyrinth of Night.'

'The Cult of the Dragon?' asked Dalia, her excitement piqued. 'I've never heard of it.'

'Few have,' said Rho-mu 31. 'It was an obscure sect of madmen. Regrettably only one of many on Mars.'

'But who are they?'

'When the adepts who attempted to set up forges within the Noctis Labyrinthus abandoned their workings, not everyone left with them. A few deluded souls remained behind.'

A rush of air filled the transit station. A mag-lev train was approaching.

'I need to go there,' said Dalia. 'I need to go there now.'

'Why?'

'I don't exactly know, but there's something important there, I can feel it.'

'There is nothing there but darkness,' said Rho-mu 31, placing a meaty hand on Dalia's shoulder. 'Are you truly sure of the path you are on?'

Dalia shuddered at Rho-mu 31's mention of the darkness, but slowly the implications of his words emerged from behind her fear. 'Wait a minute… you're not going to stop me?'

'I am not,' said Rho-mu 31. 'And if you insist on making this journey, I have no choice but to accompany you.'

'Accompany us?' asked Zouche. 'Now why would you do a thing like that and not drag us back to Adept Zeth? You have to know we're travelling without her sanction.'

'Be quiet, Zouche!' said Severine.

Rho-mu 31 nodded. 'I am aware of that, but Adept Zeth tasked me with keeping Dalia Cythera safe. She said nothing about restricting her movements.'

'I don't understand,' said Dalia as the glowing stab-lights of a mag-lev emerged from the arched tunnel and the smell of ozone grew stronger.

'Mars is in crisis, Dalia Cythera,' said Rho-mu 31. 'Disaster strikes at every turn, and though Adept Zeth's forge escaped the worst of it, our beloved planet is on the verge of slipping into chaos.'

'Chaos? What are you talking about?' asked Caxton. 'We heard some rumours of accidents, but nothing like as serious as you're making out.'

'Whatever you have heard, I can assure you the reality is far worse than you can possibly imagine,' said Rho-mu 31. 'The terror of Old Night threatens to descend upon us once more, and I believe Dalia may hold the key to our salvation.'

'Me? No… I told you before that I'm nobody,' said Dalia, unwilling to be saddled with such responsibility.

'You are wrong, Dalia,' stated Rho-mu 31 as the mag-lev came to a halt behind her. 'You have an innate understanding of technology, but I believe what makes you special is the ability to intuit things that others would not. If you think there is something within the Noctis Labyrinthus of importance, then I am willing to put my faith in you.'

'I thought you didn't believe in faith?'

'I don't. I believe in you.'

Dalia smiled. 'Thank you,' she said.

'I do not require your thanks,' replied Rho-mu 31. 'I am a Protector. I am your Protector. That is my purpose.'

'I thank you anyway.'

Caxton patted Dalia on the shoulder. 'Well, if we're going to go, we should probably get on this mag-lev?' Dalia nodded and looked up at her Protector. 'After you,' said Rho-mu 31.

Adept Zeth stood in the highest tower of her forge, the noospheric halo above her head twitching with information. She sorted through a number of active feeds with her MIU. None of them made for easy reading.

Most were streaming from the forges of Fabricator Locum Kane and Ipluvien Maximal, but there were others coming in from isolated adepts that had come through the Death of Innocence and were desperately seeking friendly voices.

Beside her, one of her underlings waited uncomfortably for the adept to speak.

'Be at ease,' said Zeth. 'Rho-mu 31 is with them now.'

'They're safe?'

Zeth shrugged and glanced down at the woman beside her. 'As much as anyone can be said to be safe on Mars just now.'

'And he'll keep them from harm?'

'That is his purpose,' agreed Zeth. 'Though a journey to the Noctis Labyrinthus is not without peril. They will pass close to Mondus Gamma, the domain of Lukas Chrom, and he is a pawn of the Fabricator General.'

'That's bad, isn't it?'

'Yes, I rather suspect it is,' said Zeth, thinking of what Kane had told her. 'It is imperative that no one else should learn of Dalia's whereabouts.'

'Of course.'

'Delete all records of her destination from your memory coils and supply me with a record of deletion. Understood?'

'Yes.'

Zeth waited for a few seconds until the deletion record arrived in her noosphere before speaking again.

'You should return to your duties,' she said. 'Ambassador Melgator will be arriving soon from Olympus Mons and I think it would be better if you were elsewhere.'

'As you wish,' said Mellicin.

2.05

Of all the visitors ever to climb the steps to her forge, Ambassador Melgator was one of the least welcome. Koriel Zeth watched the man approach, his thin body wrapped in a dark, ermine-trimmed robe, his few overt augmetics concealed beneath a hood of dark velvet. Though Kelbor-Hal's messenger was still some distance away, Zeth's enhanced vision saw that the ambassador had changed since last she had seen him.

His skin was waxen and unhealthy, yet his eyes remained dark pools of sinister purpose like a bearer of bad news eager to spread his misery. However, Melgator's presence, as unwelcome and unlooked for as it was, did not worry her so much as that of his companion.

Sheathed in an all-enclosing bodyglove of a gleaming synthetic material that rippled like blood across her skin, a slender female figure followed a discreet distance behind the ambassador.

Zeth needed no help from the noosphere to recognise what this woman was.

asked Magos Polk in a soft cant of binary. Zeth could read her apprenta's disquiet in the formulation of his numerics and hoped her own biometrics did not betray her unease so obviously.

'Yes,' she said. 'Do not speak to her if you can avoid it.'

'Have no worries about that,' promised Polk. 'Not if my life depended on it.'

'Let us hope it does not come to that, Polk,' said Zeth. 'But her presence here cannot be a good thing.'

'Surely the Fabricator General has merely despatched her as a guard for the ambassador after all the troubles we have had,' said Polk, his tone begging for reassurance.

'Perhaps, but I doubt it. To act merely as a bodyguard would be seen as beneath the skills of a tech-priest assassin.'

'Then why is she here?'

Zeth felt her irritation at Polk's questions grow, but forced it down. 'I expect we shall find out soon enough,' she said. This meeting with Kelbor-Hal's lackey would need a clear head and Zeth could not afford to be distracted by Polk's fear, even though it mirrored her own.

The tech-priest assassins were a body of mysterious and aloof killers who had existed since the settling of Mars in the distant past. A law unto themselves, they answered to no authority save that of unknown masters said to dwell in the shadows of the Cydonia Mensae.

Melgator and his accomplice reached the plinth beneath the great portico, and Zeth wondered if this was how she was going to die, struck down by an assassin's blade, her vital fluids pouring down the steps of her forge.

Melgator smiled, though Zeth found nothing reassuring in its reptilian insincerity. The ambassador and his companion came towards her, passing into the splayed shadows of the piston columns and golden portico. Melgator moved with the clicking gait of one whose lower limbs were augmetic, while the assassin flowed across the milky white marble of the floor as though on ice.

Zeth saw that the assassin's legs were long and multi-jointed, fused together just above the ankles by a spar of metal, below which her legs ended not in feet, but in a complex series of magno-gravitic thrusters that skimmed her along just off the ground. Her athletic form was beautifully deadly, honed to perfect physicality by a rigorous regime of physical exercise, gene-manipulation and surgical augmentation.

Melgator stopped before Zeth and bowed deeply, his arms spread wide.

'Adept Zeth,' he began. 'It is a pleasure to once again visit your unique forge.'

'You are welcome, Ambassador Melgator,' said Zeth. 'This is my magos-apprenta, Adept Polk.'

She left her words hanging and Melgator read the pause expertly. He turned towards his companion, who wore a facemask fashioned in the form of a grinning crimson skull with a horn of gleaming metal jutting from its chin.

'This is my… associate, Remiare,' said Melgator.

Zeth nodded towards Remiare and the assassin inclined her head a fraction in acknowledgement. Zeth took a second to study the hardwired targeting apparatus grafted to Remiare's mask and the long snake-like sensor tendrils that swam in the air from the rear portion of her cranium.

'And what brings you to my forge?' asked Zeth, turning and leading Melgator towards the wall of bronze doors that led within. Polk dropped back to stand at her right shoulder, while Melgator and Remiare fell in smoothly to her left.

'I come to you as a great shadow hangs over our beloved planet, Adept Zeth. Disaster strikes Mars at every turn and in times of such trouble friends should stand shoulder to shoulder.'

'Indeed,' replied Zeth as they passed into the forge and along its silver-skinned arterial halls. 'We have suffered greatly and much has been lost that can never be recovered.'

'Alas, you speak the truth,' said Melgator, and Zeth could barely keep the contempt she felt for his false concern from her field auras. 'Thus it is ever more imperative that friends should acknowledge one another and do whatever is necessary to aid one another.'

Zeth did not answer Melgator's leading comment and turned into Aetna's Processional, a passageway of ouslite walls and burning braziers that led into a high-ceilinged chamber at the heart of Adept Zeth's forge.

Formed from the intertwining of twisted columns of silver and gold, the web-like walls rose to a tapered point above the centre of the chamber. Gracefully curved sheets of burnished steel and crystal rippled overhead, winding through the columns to form an impossibly beautiful latticework roof, like glittering shards of ice frozen in the moment of shattering. The toxic skies of Mars were visible through the gaps in the columns as angled slivers of cadmium, hazed by the void shielding that surrounded the highest peak of the forge.

Beneath the apex of the roof, a wide shaft descended into the depths of the forge and a fiery orange glow billowed upwards from the heart of the magma far below. Searing heat and waves of energising power rippled the air over the shaft as Melgator made appropriately impressed noises.

Receptors like thin, slitted gills opened in the folds of his neck as Melgator partook of the invisible currents of drifting electricity.

Remiare paid the hot majesty of the space no mind, her own energy receptors kept hidden beneath her body-glove, and Zeth felt as though the assassin's attention was focused firmly on the cardinal weak points of her bronze armour. She shared a glance with Magos Polk, who assumed a deferential pose beside her with his hand tucked into the sleeves of his robe.

'It has been too long since I stood within the Chamber of Vesta,' said Melgator. 'Your current is exquisite. I can almost feel the fire of the red planet within me.'

'It has always been here,' pointed out Zeth. 'Those who are friends to the Magma City are always welcome to take sustenance within its walls.'

'Then I should hope you count the Fabricator General amongst such friends.'

'Why should I not?' asked Zeth. 'Kelbor-Hal has never expressed his displeasure with me. He continues the great work of the Mechanicum, does he not?'

'Indeed he does,' said Melgator quickly. 'And he sends me to you in the spirit of peace in these dark days of loss and death to assure you of his continued goodwill.'

'The spirit of peace,' said Zeth, walking around the shaft in the centre of the chamber. Polk made to follow her, but she waved him away. The heat was intense and she could feel her organic portions begin to sweat. 'Is that why you come to me in the company of one of the Sisters of Cydonia?'

'These are troubled times, Adept Zeth,' said Melgator.

'You said that already.'

'I am aware of that, but it is a point I cannot make strongly enough,' replied Melgator. 'An enemy strikes at us, weakens our forges, and only a fool dares to travel without precautions.'

'An assassin is a precaution?' asked Zeth, turning towards Remiare. 'Has the Cydonian Sisterhood fallen so far that they are now mere bodyguards?'

The assassin cocked her head to one side, like a bird of prey regarding a helpless morsel, and though glistening fabric obscured her expression, Zeth felt an acute tremor along the adamantium curve of her spine.

'I can taste your fear of me,' said Remiare softly, her eyes like black marbles behind the horned death mask. 'Yet still you bait me with barbed words. Why would you do this when you know I can kill you?'

Zeth controlled her breathing and metabolic rate with a measured release of glanded stimms as Melgator said, 'There will be no killing, Remiare. This is a mission of renewed friendship in a time when allies are to be more prized than pure-streaming data.'

Melgator turned to Zeth, his hands held out before him. 'Yes, I bring a warrior to your forge, but it is only because our very way of existence is threatened that I come so accompanied.'

'Threatened by whom? Does the Fabricator General know who unleashed the corrupt code into the Martian systems.'

'He does not know for certain, but he has strong suspicions,' replied Melgator.

'Any you would care to divulge?'

Melgator began circling the fire shaft towards Zeth, lacing his hands behind his back as he walked.

'Perhaps,' nodded Melgator. 'But may I first ask how the Magma City escaped the devastation so many other, less fortunate, forges suffered?'

Zeth hesitated, unsure of how much Melgator knew and how much he only suspected. In truth, she wasn't entirely sure why her forge had been spared, though she had her suspicions, none of which she was comfortable sharing with a minion of the Fabricator General.

In the end she decided on a partial truth. 'I believe the singular nature of the noosphere prevented the debased code from entering my systems,' she said.

'And yet the forges of Ipluvien Maximal and Fabricator Locum Kane suffered in the attack. They have recently upgraded their information networks to the noosphere, have they not? So perhaps there is some other reason you were spared?

said Zeth, hoping Melgator would read the honesty in her cant and not the evasion of her words. She prayed that Polk's aegis barriers in his noospheric aura were in place.

'Then might it be the latest endeavour taking shape within your Inner Forge? It has not gone unnoticed that your newest creation, whatever it is, requires lowly transcribers sequestered from Terra and a great many psykers secretly brought down from the Black Ships.'

'How can you think you know what goes on within my inner forge?' asked Zeth, shaken to the core of her being that Melgator was aware of such things.

Melgator laughed. 'Come now, Adept Zeth. You think the workings of any adept on Mars are truly hidden? Information is woven into every passage of electrons across the surface of the red planet and you know how the spirits of machines love to share their secrets.'

'The workings of my forge are my own to know, Melgator,' snapped Zeth. 'As I said, I believe that it was my adoption of the noosphere that saved my forge from destruction.'

Melgator smiled ruefully. 'Very well, I will accept that. Perhaps if you had freely shared the technology of the noosphere with your fellow adepts then Mars might have been spared the horror of the Death of Innocence.'

'Perhaps if the Fabricator General had put more faith in the noosphere when I presented it to him, that might have been the case,' countered Zeth.

Melgator smiled, conceding the point. 'May I speak frankly, Adept Zeth?'

'Of course, the Chamber of Vesta is a place of honest discourse.'

'Then I will be blunt,' said Melgator. 'My master believes he knows the source of the attack on our infrastructure and he seeks to rally all true sons and daughters of Ares to the defence of Mars.'

'The defence of Mars?' asked Zeth, nonplussed. 'Defence against whom?'

'Against Terra.'

Zeth was stunned. Of all the answers she had expected Melgator to give, this had not been amongst them. She tried to cover her surprise, by turning and looking out over the Martian landscape. The sky was turning from blue to purple, heavy, toxin-laden clouds sparking with lightning over the distant forge of Mondus Gamma.

'Terra,' she said, slowly as though tasting the word for the first time.

'Terra,' repeated Melgator. 'Now that the Great Crusade is almost at an end, the Emperor desires to end his union with Mars and take our world for his own.'

'Kelbor-Hal thinks the Emperor attacked us?' asked Zeth, spinning to face Melgator. 'Do you realise how insane that sounds?'

Melgator approached her with a pleading look. 'Is it insane to want to hold on to what we have built here over the millennia, Adept Zeth? Is it insanity to suspect that a man who has all but conquered the entire galaxy should allow one world among millions to remain aloof from his empire? No, the attack on our world's information systems was but the first strike in breaking the Treaty of Olympus and bringing the Mechanicum to heel.'

Zeth laughed in his face. 'I see now why you brought this assassin with you, Melgator - in case I should call you traitor and have you killed.'

Melgator's stance changed from one of supplication to one of aggression in an instant and hands that had once been outstretched towards her now dropped to his sides.

'You would do well to choose your next words carefully, Adept Zeth.'

'Why would that be? Will you have Remiare here kill me if you don't like them?'

'No,' said Melgator. 'I would not be so foolish as to anger the Omnissiah by murdering an adept of Mars in her own forge.'

'The Omnissiah?' spat Zeth. 'You speak of the Emperor breaking faith with the Mechanicum and in the next breath use him as a reason not to murder me?'

'I speak of the Omnissiah as an aspect of the Machine-God yet to manifest, not the Emperor.'

'Most believe them to be one and the same.'

'But not you?'

'You already know what I believe,' said Zeth, angered beyond caution. 'There is no Machine-God. Technology is science and reason, not superstition and blind faith. It's what I've always believed and it's what I still believe. Now if you're not going to kill me, get out of my forge!'

'Are you sure about this, Zeth?' asked Melgator. 'Turning your back on the Fabricator General will have dire consequences.'

'Is that a threat?'

'A threat? No, merely a reiteration that we live in dangerous times and that the friendship of powerful allies would be no bad thing in the days ahead.'

'Friendship? Kelbor-Hal asks me to side with him against Terra!' barked Zeth. 'What manner of friend would ask such a thing?'

Melgator slid his hands into the sleeves of his robes. 'The kind that knows what is best for Mars.'

Melgator slowly descended the steps of Zeth's forge, savouring the memory of Adept Zeth's admission of her disbelief in the Machine-God. It was all the excuse the Fabricator General needed to seize the Magma City and learn all the secrets of her forge, and Zeth had handed it to them on a plate.

He wiped a hand across his brow. Sweat beaded on his forehead in the intolerably dry heat that wrapped the city like a shroud. Melgator had travelled far and wide in his role as ambassador, but this place had to rank as one of the most inhospitable on Mars.

The sooner it was plundered and laid to waste the better.

Beside him, Remiare hovered effortlessly above the steps, her masked face unreadable in the orange-lit gloom.

'Zeth knows why she escaped the scrapcode's attack,' said Melgator. 'Or at least she suspects she knows.'

'Of course,' answered Remiare. 'Her apprenta was bleeding fear and information from his noospheric aura. I have stored everything I could access from his files on Zeth's work in my memory coils, and I will exload them to the Fabricator General's logic engines upon our return to Olympus Mons.'

'You can lift data from the noosphere? I didn't know that,' said Melgator, more than a little unnerved.

'Of course, the secrets of the noosphere are well known to the Sisters of Cydonia. As are the means to manipulate the mind structure beyond it.'

'What about his aegis barrier?'

'Simplicity itself to overcome.'

'Did he notice your presence?' asked Melgator.

'No, but I decided to fuse the portions of his mind that would have remembered anyway.'

'If he did not detect your intrusion, why the need to burn out his memory synapses?'

Remiare turned her deathly face towards him, and Melgator was reminded that the assassins of Cydonia did not take kindly to questions.

'Because I enjoy making living things suffer,' said Remiare. 'Zeth's apprenta will no longer be able to form memories that last. His usefulness as an individual is at an end.'

Melgator swallowed, warier than ever of the monstrous creature beside him.

At last he reached the bottom of the steps, where a skimmer palanquin of bronze and polished timber panels stood ready to carry him to the landing platform upon which his transport waited.

'So how did Zeth defeat the scrapcode attack?'

The black, soulless marbles of Remiare's eyes flickered as she retrieved and sorted the data. 'I do not know and nor does Zeth, not completely, though the apprenta was of the opinion that a female named Dalia Cythera was responsible.'

'The transcriber Zeth brought from Terra? She did it?'

'So it would seem.'

'Then we need to eliminate her as soon as possible,' said Melgator. 'Where is she?'

'Unknown. Her biometrics are not registered in the Martian database.'

'She was working in Zeth's forge and she's not even Cult Mechanicum?'

'Apparently not.'

'Ah, Zeth, you're almost making it too easy for us,' chuckled Melgator. 'Can you track this Dalia Cythera?'

'I can, but it will be easier just to take the information from the people she knows,' said Remiare. 'Archived work dockets list her as being assigned to a team of four individuals: Zouche Chahaya, Severine Delmer, Mellicin Oster and Caxton Torgau. Only Mellicin Oster is still within the Magma City.'

'Where?'

'Within Arsia Mons sub-hive Epsilon-Aleph-Ultima,' said Remiare. 'Fiftieth floor, shutter seventeen. Off shift until 07:46 tomorrow morning.'

'Find her,' hissed Melgator. 'Learn everything she knows.'

The mag-lev was full, every seat taken, but the threatening presence of Rho-mu 31 assured them a private cabin, though it was still cramped with the five of them wedged in tight. Rho-mu 31 stood at the door to their cabin, his weapon stave held tight across his chest, leaving the four seats for Zouche, Dalia, Severine and Caxton.

Zouche and Severine sat across from her, and Caxton lay with his head on her shoulder, snoring softly. The pale, artificial light from the window gleamed from his tonsure's scalp, and Dalia smiled as she leaned back against the faux leather chair. She looked out over the Martian landscape as the rest of her companions slept. Even Rho-mu 31 was resting, the glow of his eyes dimmed as he conserved power, though his internal auspex was still vigilant.

Beyond the energy shielded glass, undulant plains stretched off into the distance, the grey emptiness of the polluted wastelands somehow beautiful to Dalia. Unfinished or abandoned mag-lev lines stretched off into invisibility in long rows of sun-bleached concrete T's, and the sight brought a forlorn ache to Dalia's chest.

It had been years since she had seen a landscape as vast as this, and even though it was bleak and inhospitable, it was wide open and the heavens above held the landscape protectively close to them. Bands of pollutants striped the sky like sedimentary rock, and columns of light pierced the darkness as ships broke atmosphere.

A shiver travelled the length of Dalia's spine as she felt the aching loneliness that had become part of her soul since her connection with the thing beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus. The desolate emptiness outside was so endless that Dalia could easily imagine Mars to be dead, a world utterly scoured of life and abandoned for all eternity.

She was tired, but couldn't sleep. The black emptiness behind her eyes lurked in the back of her mind like a hidden predator that would strike the instant she allowed the shadows to cloak it.

'Can't sleep, eh?' asked Zouche, and Dalia looked up. She had thought him to be asleep.

'No,' agreed Dalia, keeping her voice low. 'A lot on my mind.'

Zouche nodded and ran a hand over his shaven scalp. 'Understandable. We're out on a limb, Dalia. I just hope this journey turns out to be worth it.'

'I know it will, Zouche,' promised Dalia.

'What do you think we're going to find out there?'

'Honestly, I'm not sure. But whatever it is, I know it's in pain. It's been trapped in the darkness for such a long time and it's suffering. We have to find it.'

'And what happens when we do?'

'What do you mean?'

'When we find this thing, this… dragon. Are you thinking about freeing it?'

'I think we have to,' said Dalia. 'Nothing deserves to suffer like it's suffering.'

'I hope you're right,' said Zouche.

'You think I'm wrong to want to help?'

'Not necessarily,' said Zouche, 'but what if this thing is meant to suffer? After all, we don't know for sure who put it there, so perhaps they had a very good reason to do so? We don't know what it is, so maybe whatever it is should be left in the darkness forever.'

'I don't believe that,' said Dalia. 'Nothing deserves to suffer forever.'

'Some things do,' said Zouche, his voice little more than a hushed whisper.

'What, Zouche?' demanded Dalia. 'Tell me who or what deserves to suffer forever?'

Zouche met her stare. She could see that it was taking all his control to maintain his composure and she wondered what door she'd opened with her question. He sat in silence for a moment, then said, 'Back before people lived freely on Nusa Kambangan, it was once a prison, a hellish place where the worst of the worst were locked up - murderers, clone-surgeons, rapists, gene-thieves and serial killers. And tyrants.'

'Tyrants?'

'Oh, yes indeed,' said Zouche, and Dalia thought she detected more than a hint of bitter pride in his voice. 'Cardinal Tang himself was held there.'

'Tang? The Ethnarch?'

'The very same,' nodded Zouche. 'When his last bastion fell, he was taken in chains to Nusa Kambangan, though he was only there a few days. Word got out of who he was and another prisoner cut his throat. Though if you ask me, he got off lightly.'

'Having your throat cut is getting off lightly?' asked Dalia, horrified by Zouche's coldness.

'After what Tang did? Absolutely,' said Zouche. 'After all the bloody pogroms, death camps and genocides, you think his suffering should have ended swiftly? Tang deserved to rot in the deepest, darkest hole of Terra, condemned to suffer the same torments and agonies he inflicted on his victims. In the end, his suffering was much quicker than the millions he put to death during his reign. So, yes, I make no apology for thinking he got off lightly. Trust me, Dalia, there are some that deserve to be left in the darkness to pay for their crimes for all eternity.'

Tears rolled down Zouche's cheeks as he spoke, and Dalia felt a wave of sorrow as she felt a measure of his pain, even though she didn't fully understand it.

'My parents died in one of Tang's camps,' continued Zouche, wiping the tears away with the sleeve of his robe.

'For the crime of falling in love when they were genetically assigned to other partners. They kept their relationship a secret, but when I was born it was obvious to everyone they'd produced an inferior offspring and they were hauled off to Tang's death camp on Roon Island.'

'Oh, Zouche, that's terrible,' said Dalia. 'I'm so sorry. I didn't know.'

Zouche shrugged and stared beyond the glass of the compartment. 'How could you? But it doesn't matter. Tang's dead and the Emperor guides us now. People like Tang won't ever rise again now that the Imperium's in his hands.'

'You're not inferior,' said Dalia, cutting across his train of words.

'What?' he said, looking back at her.

'I said you're not inferior,' repeated Dalia. 'You might think you are because you look different to the rest of us, but you're not. You're a brilliant engineer and a loyal friend. I'm glad you're with me, Zouche. I really am.'

He smiled and nodded. 'I know you are and I'm grateful for that, but I know what I am. You're a good girl, Dalia, so I'd be obliged if you didn't mention this to anyone, you understand?'

'Of course,' said Dalia. 'I won't say a word. I think the rest are going to sleep all the way there, anyway.'

'Quite probably,' agreed Zouche, a discreetly extended mechadendrite linking with the port in the compartment's wall. Flickering light ghosted behind his eyelids as he linked with the mag-lev's onboard logic-engine. It was easy to forget that the Mechanicum had substantially modified Zouche, for most of his augmetics were subtle, and he was reticent about openly displaying them to one not of the Cult Mechanicum. 'It's going to take us two days to reach the point nearest the Noctis Labyrinthus, an outlying hub of Mondus Gamma in the northern Syrian sub-fabriks.'

'Two days? Why so long?'

'This is a supply train,' explained Zouche. 'We're going to pass through a lot of the borderland townships on the edge of the pallidus. According to the onboard timetable, we're about to reach Ash Border, then we'll pass through Dune Town, Crater Edge and Red Gorge before we begin the descent to the Syria Planum and Mondus Gamma.'

'Not big on originality when it comes to their settlement names, are they?' observed Dalia.

'Not really, I suppose they just name it as they see it,' said Zouche. 'When you live out on the edge of civilisation, there's a virtue in simplicity.'

'I think there's a virtue in that wherever you are,' said Dalia.

The hab was warm, but then it was always warm. Hot air rising from the magma lagoon rolled up the flanks of the volcano in dry, parching waves to leach the moisture from the air like a giant dehumidifier.

Mellicin lay on her bed, with one hand thrown over her forehead. Sweat gathered in the spoons of her collarbones and she felt uncomfortably sticky and hot. The atomiser was turned on, but might as well have been switched off for all the difference it was making. She rolled onto her side, unable to sleep and unable to stop thinking of what might be happening to Dalia and the others.

She told herself it wasn't guilt, but only half-believed it.

Zeth had placed her with Dalia with the express purpose of passing on her impressions and insights into the young transcriber's mind, and that was exactly what she had done. There had been no betrayal, no breach of trust and certainly no disloyalty.

The only betrayal would have been if she had failed in her duty to her mistress.

Why, then, did she feel so bad about telling Adept Zeth of Dalia's plans?

Mellicin knew exactly why she felt bad.

In the weeks she had worked with Dalia Cythera, Mellicin had rediscovered the joy of working on the frontiers of technology. Together they had discovered new and wondrous things, devices and theoretical science that they had gone on to prove valid. How long had it been since she, or indeed anyone in the Mechanicum, had done that? True, Adept Zeth was forever pushing the boundaries of what was known and accepted, but she was a tiny cog in a larger machine and there was only so much she dared risk.

The Mechanicum was old and unforgiving with those who disobeyed its strictures.

They had been gone less than a day and already she missed them. She wished she knew where they were so she could have tapped into the Martian networks to follow their progress, but she had wiped Dalia's destination from her memory coils.

Right now, they could be anywhere, en route to the far side of the planet for all she knew.

Mellicin had got used to their foibles, strengths and blind spots. She had nurtured them, blended them together until they were a team, working more efficiently and more enthusiastically than any of them had ever worked before.

Now they were off making good use of that mentoring and she was left behind.

She swung her legs out of bed and ran a hand through her hair. It was matted and sweaty, and no amount of time in the sonic shower would make it feel clean. She padded softly from the bed alcove and made her way to the kitchenette to fix a pot of caffeine. If she wasn't going to get any sleep, she might as well use the time productively.

She yawned as the heating ring fired the pot, wiping sweat from her brow as the pot bubbled and hissed. She poured a cup and sat in the dining nook within the polarised glass bay that looked out over the surface of the red planet.

This high up, Mellicin was above the distorting fumes that filmed the lower level windows with grime and pyroclastic deposits. Far below her, the Magma City blazed with light, an ocean of glowing industry in a desert of industrial wasteland. Silver trails of mag-levs spun out from the city, ttavelling to all parts of Mars, but beyond them the planet was shrouded in banks of dust and polluted fogs.

Mellicin put down her cup and leaned her forehead on the hot glass. Lights moved in the city, and glittering transits ferried cargo and supplies to the port facilities.

'Wherever you are, Dalia, I wish you well,' she whispered, feeling very alone.

She frowned as she realised she wasn't alone.

Her biometric surveyors were reading another life form in her hab.

'I was wondering when you would notice me,' said a voice from the shadows.

Mellicin jumped at the sound, looking up in frozen surprise as a lithe, sensual woman glided from the darkness. She was clad in a skin-tight red bodyglove and a pair of finely-wrought pistols were sheathed at her hips.

Mellicin covered her surprise and said, 'I knew you were there, I was just waiting to see when you would announce yourself.'

'A lie, but one necessary for you to feel you are still in control,' said the woman.

'Who are you, and what are you doing in my hab?' asked Mellicin, still too surprised to feel anything but annoyance.

'My name is irrelevant, because soon you won't remember it,' said the woman, and as she moved into the light,

Mellicin saw the golden death mask she wore. 'But for the record, it is Remiare.'

Mellicin's annoyance turned to fear as she realised what this woman was. 'That's half my question answered.'

Remiare cocked her head to one side and said, 'You still think you have a measure of control, don't you?'

'What do you want?' asked Mellicin, pushing herself further into the dining nook.

'You know what I want.'

'No, actually,' said Mellicin, 'I don't.'

'Then I shall tell you,' said Remiare. 'I want you to tell me the whereabouts and destination of Dalia Cythera.'

Mellicin furrowed her brow, as if in thought, and activated her silent alarm. Adept Zeth would now be aware of her plight and a squad of Mechanicum Protectors would soon be despatched to her rescue. All she had to do was stall.

'Dalia?' she said at last. 'Why do you want to know about her?'

'No more questions,' said Remiare. 'Tell me what I want to know and I promise you won't suffer.'

'I can't,' said Mellicin. 'Even if I wanted to. I might have known what you want, but I don't remember anymore.'

'You're lying.'

'I'm not. Adept Zeth had me erase any knowledge of where Dalia was going from my memory coils.'

She regretted her smug tone instantly as Remiare ghosted closer and Mellicin saw the red light of the magma lagoon reflected on her death mask. Her face was the visage of something vile and terrible, a leering monster from her darkest nightmares. Even amid her fear, she recognised the exquisite work of the assassin's gravitic thrusters, the sinuous form of a killer bred and trained from birth.

'Then that's very bad news for you.'

'And why's that?' asked Mellicin, trying to muster some bravado.

'Because nothing is ever really erased, Mellicin,' said Remiare as a silver spike extended from her forefinger.

Despite the heat in the small dwelling hab, Mellicin suddenly felt very cold indeed as she recognised it as a data spike.

'Why do you want to find Dalia?' asked Mellicin, the words coming out in a fear-induced rush. 'I mean, she's nothing, just a transcriber from Terra. All she did was take notes of our work. Really, why do you want her?'

Remiare's head darted forward like a feeding bird's and she laughed, the sound soulless and dead. 'You are trying to keep me talking because you believe help is on its way, but it isn't. No one is coming, Mellicin. I am the only one hearing that insultingly simple silent alarm your implants are broadcasting.'

'I'm telling you, I erased the things you're looking for!'

'You may have erased your memory coils, but the soft meat beneath remembers,' said Remiare while softly wagging her finger. 'The Mechanicum never deletes anything.'

Mellicin glanced down at her cup of caffeine and wondered if she would be quick enough to throw it in the assassin's face. That question was answered a moment later. One second, the red-clad woman was standing before her, the next she was seated next to her, pressing her against the warm glass of her hab.

A hand with fingers like steel rods shot out and gripped her throat, tilting her head back.

'I don't know what you want!' screamed Mellicin as the assassin's data spike pressed against the augmetic orb that replaced her right eye.

'I'll find what I want,' promised Remiare. 'All I have to do is dig deep enough.'

2.06

He had always dreaded this, but now that it was his life, he knew there had been nothing to fear. In the world of flesh, his body had been aging and weakening, but here in this world of amniotic suspension he was all-powerful and all-conquering.

In a simulated engine war, Princeps Cavalerio fought and killed like a living metal god, bestriding the virtual arena like a colossus of battle. His enemies died: skitarii crushed underfoot, Reavers torn to pieces in the terrible, smashing hell of engine combat and Warlords blasted apart with weapons fire in murderous killing salvoes.

The world of flesh was over for Cavalerio. The world of metal was now his domain.

Liquid data spiralled around him, fed to him through receptors implanted beneath his skin, filling his sensory apparatus with information that would overwhelm the brains of those less augmented than he. Darts of light, each one carrying a welter of data, swirled around him like shoals of glowing fish as he ended yet another simulation as the victor.

Cavalerio was unrecognisable as the spare, limping mortal that had walked the surface of Mars. A man he had been, but a creation of the Mechanicum he was now. His pallid flesh floated in nutrient-rich jelly, hung from a multitude of cables that connected him to the world around him in ways too numerous to count.

Each day since his incarceration within the casket brought new attachments, new augmetics and new sensations. Only now did he realise how imperfect had his existence been as a mere mortal, confined to a mere five senses.

A thick inflexible cable pierced his spine between the lumbar vertebrae, while other, more delicate wires were plugged into his eye sockets. A forest of cables extruded from the rear of his cranial cavity that would link to the Manifold when he once again took charge of an engine. Both arms were encased in metal to his elbows, and both his feet had been amputated and replaced with haptic sheaths.

The transition had been difficult and not without setbacks, but his famulous, Agathe, had been with him every step of the way, soothing him, cajoling him and encouraging him to overcome every problem. Though initially hostile to the idea of a famulous, Cavalerio now appreciated how vital such a person was when you were confined to an amniotic tank.

The terrible, aching loss of Victorix Magna still haunted his nightmares, as he knew it would for the rest of his days. No princeps survived the death of his engine without psychological scarring, but with every simulated engagement, his warlike confidence grew stronger. Soon his ability to command an engine became faster and more efficient, until he knew he was better than he ever had been in his previous life.

As this latest simulation came to an end, the fury of battle and the exhilaration of connection faded from his consciousness with a sharp pang of regret. It wasn't the same as physically disengaging from an engine, but it was close, and he could already feel the hunger to go back in creeping at the edge of his psyche.

he canted in a soft sigh of binary.

His awareness of the world around him swam into focus as the images of battle faded like banished phantoms. Slowly the world of reality began to impose itself on his perception. Though Cavalerio no longer saw the world as he once had, the sensorium installed as part of his casket allowed him even greater acuity than ever before. He identified the biometrics of the two people standing in his casket chamber before any visual recognition was made.

He could see Agathe's physical form, which was short and slightly rounded, as well as reading her biometrics and the electrical field densities of her subtle augmetics. Her noospheric modifications flickered and tiny geysers of data light streamed above her head.

The second figure was Princeps Sharaq.

'My princeps?' said Agathe, startled by his sudden vocalisation. 'Do you require anything?'

'Hmmm? No, Agathe, I was just thinking aloud.'

'Congratulations on another successful engagement, Indias,' said Sharaq.

'Thank you, Kel,' said Cavalerio. 'Did you see how I took down the second Warlord?'

Sharaq smiled, and Cavalerio read the genuine pleasure his friend took in the accomplishment. 'I saw it, my princeps. Masterful.'

'I know,' said Cavalerio without arrogance. 'I am faster and more cohesive in my command than ever before. I merely think an order and the engine responds. Data streams into me straight from the Manifold, which increases my reaction and response times by an average of nine point seven per cent. That's more than the difference between life and death in an engine fight.'

'That's good to hear,' said Sharaq. 'You're adjusting well, then?'

'I am, Kel, I am. My days are full. I fight simulated engagements every day, though only Agathe watches me now. Between my battles and surgery, Princeps Kasim comes to check on my progress, and we share stories of our glorious Legio's history.'

'And the casket?' asked Sharaq. 'You don't miss… well, flesh?'

Cavalerio hesitated before answering. 'It was difficult,' he admitted at last. 'For the longest time I thought I would go mad in here, but Agathe has helped many a princeps adjust to his new life. And, as time went on, I began to understand that this was what I was destined for.'

'Destined?'

'Yes, Kel, destined. I don't know why I resisted immersion for all those years. I link with the Manifold and it's so much closer than it was before. When I commanded Victorix Magna I could feel what she felt, but it was borrowed sensation. Now I am the engine. This shouldn't be the last resort of an aging or injured princeps, this should be the standard method of command for all the bigger engines.'

'I think you might have a hard time convincing some of the die-hards of that.'

'Not if they knew what I know,' said Cavalerio. 'But what say we dispense with the small talk and discuss the real reason for your visit?'

Sharaq nodded, circling the tank with the awe of one in the presence of greatness, and Cavalerio read his unease in his increased heart rate and spiking alpha waves.

'It's all right, Kel,' said Cavalerio. 'You don't need to feel guilty. You did what you had to do and I would have been disappointed if you hadn't.'

Sharaq stopped his circling and knelt before the casket, placing his hand on the warm glass of the tank. Cavalerio floated to the front, his flesh marbled and glossy, his features all but obscured by the complex bionics that grafted him to the machinery of his life-support. Only an inch of toughened glass separated the two men, but an anatomy's worth of augmetics created a gulf between their humanity.

'I don't feel guilty,' said Sharaq. 'I know I did the right thing. You weren't fit to command the Legio then and, despite your progress, I still don't think you're ready. Soon, but not yet.'

'Then why are you here?'

'I need your help, Stormlord,' said Sharaq, 'and I need your experience. I fear I am not cut from the same cloth as you. Leadership is in your blood, but not in mine.'

'Then speak,' ordered Cavalerio. 'I may not be Princeps Senioris, but I am still your friend.'

The words were meant to comfort Sharaq, but only seemed to wound him. He looked over at Agathe and said, 'Perhaps we might speak privately, my princeps?'

'Agathe is my famulous and anything you have to say to me can be said in front of her.'

'Very well, Stormlord,' said Sharaq. 'You won't have failed to notice that you haven't been linked to any ports with outside access during your recovery. The medicae felt it would hinder your adjustment for you to be inloaded with an excess of data.'

'A decision that, with hindsight, I applaud,' said Cavalerio. 'So tell me, what's been happening beyond our fortress? Have Mortis been taken to task for their violation of our territory?'

Sharaq shook his head. 'No, my lord,' he said, 'they have not. The Princeps Conciliatus have been appraised of the facts and they have issued a summons, but both the Fabricator General and Princeps Camulos ignore it.'

'A Conciliatus summons and a rift between the Legios? Ignored? Madness!'

'All of Mars may well have gone mad, my princeps,' agreed Sharaq.

'What do you mean?'

Sharaq shared a look with Agathe and said, 'The situation on Mars has deteriorated almost to the point of open warfare. Disaster strikes at the Mechanicum from all sides and we are petitioned daily for our engines to walk.'

'Petitioned by whom?'

'I have received missives from no less than seventeen forges, all begging us to initiate an execution. With your permission, my princeps, I should like to inload your casket with the latest updates on the current tactical situation.'

'Of course, Kel,' said Cavalerio. 'Immediately.'

Sharaq said nothing and didn't appear to move, but Cavalerio felt a rush of data as his fellow princeps noospherically unlocked the feeds that were part of the Martian network and which fed directly into the smart liquid of his casket.

'Blood of the Omnissiah,' hissed Cavalerio as the data permeated his mind via informational osmosis. In an instant, he drank in the terrible events of the Death of Innocence caused by the hateful scrapcode, the spate of catastrophic machine failures and the rising tide of violence erupting all across the surface of Mars.

He saw bloodshed as forges went to war and old feuds were re-ignited. He saw opportunistic territorial grabs, spiteful acts of vengeance and hungry snatches for a rival's knowledge. The drums of battle were beating all over Mars, stirring the bellicose hearts of man, and spurring the looming presence of civil war ever closer.

It saddened him to realise that, a race apart though they might be, the Mechanicum were just as prone to human foibles as their unmodified brethren.

'And this scrapcode attack came just as Mortis walked on Ascraeus Mons?'

'We caught the first spurts of it, I think,' said Sharaq. 'It was fragmentary and dispersed, and Zeth's noospheric upgrades saved us from getting hit as hard as some others, but Legio Fortidus and Legio Agravides are gone. Their reactors went critical and took their entire fortress and a good chunk of the Erebus Montes with them.'

Cavalerio digested the information without comment, though it grieved him to think of two allied Legios lost to so ignominious a fate. He reviewed the data he'd been fed impassively, sifting through the morass of contradictory communiques, orders, requests, petitions, demands and propaganda flying between the forges. Factions were already forming, fragile alliances drawn along the lines of the tired old Omnissiah schism.

Blurts of cant circled the planet, some demanding an end to the union of Mars and Terra, while others urged all Mars to cleave more tightly to the bosom of humanity's birth rock. Worse, much of it had gone off-world, spreading like a plague on departing ships or within astropathic visions cast across the void to the Mechanicum contingents accompanying the Expedition Fleets throughout the galaxy.

'What's all this talk of Horus Lupercal?' asked Cavalerio, reading the binary version of the first primarch's name time and time again. 'What does the Warmaster have to do with any of this?'

'We're not sure, my princeps,' said Sharaq. 'The factions advocating the split from Terra seem to be championing the Warmaster as their deliverer from the Emperor. It's hard to make much sense of it, their code is so corrupt it's little more than binary screams of the Warmaster's name.'

'Has word of this reached Terra?'

'The inter-system vox is erratic, but Adept Maximal has apparently made intermittent contact with the Council of Terra.'

'And what do they make of all this?'

'It sounds like they're as confused as us, my princeps,' said Sharaq, taking a deep breath before continuing. 'Something bad has happened in the Istvaan system, something to do with the Astartes, but we can't get any hard facts.'

'But what of Mars?' pressed Cavalerio, 'what do they say about Mars?'

'The Mechanicum is told to quell the unrest or the Legions will do it for them.'

The mag-lev made good time through the southern reaches of the Tharsis uplands, skirting the edge of the pallidus and passing through a number of storms of wind-blown particulate on its journey eastwards. Dalia found the sight of the billowing ash strangely uplifting, and spent hours watching the spiralling vortices streaming down the length of the carriages.

She watched the dust rolling on and on throughout the landscape and envied its freedom to roam, blown hither and thither without direction by the winds. Increasingly she felt as though her life was just like the mag-lev, travelling upon a fixed track, guided inexorably forward to an inevitable destination. The notion of free will and choice seemed alien and strange to her, as though her brain was merely responding to external stimuli and she had no choice but to obey.

They saw little of their fellow passengers during the journey, save for the occasional awkward passing in the corridors to and from the ablutions cubicles or food dispensers. Dalia recognised most of them as low-level adepts on errands for their masters, servitors on automatic reassignment or migrant labourers moving to another forge in the hope of securing work. Perhaps three hundred souls travelled with them, but no one paid them any mind, a fact for which Dalia was absurdly grateful.

The thrill of venturing beyond the boundaries of the forge had worn thin for their little group after a few hours, and they had fallen into the strange silence of travellers on a long journey with nothing to help pass the time. The prospect of seeing one of the otherworldly pallidus border towns had excited them, but even that had proven something of a letdown.

As the mag-lev had approached Ash Border, they all roused themselves to see what one of these frontier towns looked like, for none of them had ventured beyond the hives of Mars's more populated regions.

Though Rho-mu 31 claimed not to be expecting any trouble, Dalia read his threat auspex switch to active as they came within range of the settlement's network antenna. She didn't mention that fact to the others.

Ash Border had proved to be both exotic and slightly dull at the same time, with dusty ore silos, rusted salvage barns and tall drilling machinery dominating the skyline. But with the memory of a Mechanicum forge still bright in their minds, the minor industrial complex of Ash Border seemed small and underwhelming.

The inhabitants were sullen-faced men and women with weather-beaten faces and clothes scoured identical by coarse ash. They offered no welcome and disappeared back to their ramshackle dwellings as soon as their cargo was unloaded by a handful of archaic lifter-servitors.

Dune Town lived up to its name and proved to be no less prosaic, with even more outmoded servitors unloading the allocated inventory before the mag-lev set off towards Crater Edge.

By now they had been travelling for a day and a half. Tiredness was beginning to tell and sleep was hard to come by. Though the ride was smooth, the compartment's seats had been designed with functional practicality in mind rather than comfort.

None of them had been able to muster much enthusiasm to watch Zouche's projection of the view from the driver's compartment as they approached Crater Edge, but when the mag-lev halted at the raised dock, it was quickly evident that something was different.

The place was abandoned. The dwellings were empty and the streets deserted, but it was impossible to tell whether the inhabitants had been driven away or left of their own volition.

The mag-lev was on an automated schedule, so the mystery went unexplained, and the mining supplies allocated for the township remained in the snaking transport's holds as it pulled away.

No sooner had Crater Edge vanished into the dust and haze than Dalia felt a weight she hadn't even been aware of lift from her shoulders, as though some creeping sickness lingered around the township. The place had just felt… wrong.

Not the wrongness of disease or death, but a gurgling hiss of wet code-laughter she caught drifting on the airwaves.

Red Gorge was similarly deserted, the strange whispering code ghosting around it as well. Dalia caught Rho-mu 31 twitching as he heard it too: an insistent scratching that irritated the corners of the mind like an embedded flea.

She caught his eye as the mag-lev pulled away and they saw each other's awareness of the bad code on the air.

Rho-mu 31 shook his head and she took his meaning clearly enough. Say nothing.

At last the mag-lev began the approach to the jagged line of peaks that separated the Tharsis uplands from the magnificent expanse of the Syria Planum. After a long, looping journey southwards, the mag-lev turned north to begin the slow climb over the upthrust spires of rock pushed up and over one another in an ongoing geological collision. The skies beyond the escarpment were dark and shot through with scarlet lightning, as though a great firestorm was brewing.

It had been a long journey and the sight of the two deserted townships had unsettled everyone. They had all heard tales of settlements abandoned when the ore or whatever had originally drawn the settlers there had dried up, but Red Gorge and Crater Edge hadn't felt abandoned, they had felt empty, as though the people there had just vanished. Gone in a heartbeat.

'Perhaps they were pressganged?' suggested Severine. 'I've heard of that. A forge master isn't going to meet his quota and sends his Protectors out into the wastelands to capture more people to work in their forges.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' said Caxton. 'That's just scare stories.'

'Is it?' challenged Severine. 'How do you know?'

'I just do, all right?'

'Oh, well I feel better already.'

'What do you say, Rho-mu 31?' asked Zouche in a tone of doom-laden theatrics. 'Has Adept Zeth ever sent you off to procure slaves to toil in her volcanic forge?'

'From time to time,' admitted the Protector.

That shut them all up.

'You're joking, right?' said Caxton. 'Tell me you're joking.'

'I am Mechanicum,' said Rho-mu 31. 'We never joke.'

Dalia looked into the green orbs of Rho-mu 31's eyes, and though they were devoid of anything resembling humanity, she saw the wry amusement written in his electrical field. She smiled at the horrified expressions on her friends' faces and turned away so as not to spoil Rho-mu 31's fun.

'That's… that's terrible,' said Severine. 'The Mechanicum uses slaves?' was Caxton's disgusted comment.

'I thought more of you, Rho-mu 31,' said Zouche. 'I thought more of Adept Zeth.'

When he judged the silence had gone on long enough, Rho-mu 31 leaned menacingly towards them and said, 'Got you!'

A moment's stunned silence followed Rho-mu 31's words, and then the tension in the compartment was suddenly, explosively, relieved by hysterical laughter.

'That wasn't funny,' said Caxton, between laughing and wiping tears from his eyes.

'No,' agreed Severine. 'You shouldn't say things like that.'

'What? Can't I make a joke?' asked Rho-mu 31.

'I think they're just surprised you made one at all,' put in Dalia, looking back into the compartment. 'I don't think they're used to the Mechanicum trying to be funny.'

Rho-mu 31 nodded and said, 'I may be Mechanicum, but I am still human.'

With that, the strange unease that had settled on them at the sight of the deserted townships was dispelled, and they began chatting as animatedly as when they had built the first version of the Akashic reader.

The excitement of the journey into the unknown was rekindled and as the mag-lev made its way uphill, Zouche extended a discreet dendrite and plugged into the compartment's data port, projecting the view from the hull-mounted picter onto the glass of the window.

They eagerly watched the feed as Zouche panned the image around. They saw the desolate plains stretching away to the south and the black smudge on the horizon above the Magma City nearly two thousand kilometres away. At Caxton's request, Zouche returned the view to front-on and the image shimmered as it displayed the silver mag-line carrying them up into the mountains.

Dalia let out a tiny gasp of fear as she saw the mag-line vanish into a gaping, steel-lined cavern mouth that pierced the flanks of the cliffs and led through the rock towards Mondus Gamma.

She took Caxton's hand and gripped it tightly as the tunnel drew nearer, the yawning blackness of it suddenly terrifying.

'What's the matter?' he asked.

'I didn't realise we'd need to go through the darkness,' she said.

'It's just a tunnel,' said Caxton. 'There's nothing to worry about.'

The forces of the Fabricator General came for Adept Zeth several hours before Dalia's mag-lev approached the tunnel connecting the Tharsis uplands with the Syria Planum. A Mechanicum heavy flyer cruised in from the north-west and set down on the statue-lined Typhon Causeway before the Magma City, scorching a score of the marble worthies black with the heat of its enormous jets. The underside of the craft shone with golden light from the bubbling, steaming lava to either side of the wide causeway.

The ungainly aircraft was unarmed, but as it settled on its landing skids, a continuous loop of code streamed from its augmitters on a repeating cycle, demanding that Adept Koriel Zeth present herself by the order of the Fabricator General.

The summons was broadcast in the highest and most authoritative code tense, and as such could not be ignored. The flanks of the flyer gusted steam and folded outwards, providing debarkation ramps for the warriors carried within.

Three hundred modified Skitarii and Protectors marched from the flyer's hold onto the basalt causeway. Wretched by-blows of the Fabricator General's union with the power unlocked in the depths of the forgotten vaults beneath Olympus Mons, these were twisted perversions of their original martial glory. Hunched carapaces, spiked armour and horned helmets clad them and their limb weapons seethed with unnatural power.

The Protectors were no less modified, their bodies swollen and grotesque, their weapons blackened and reforged in new and hateful shapes, designed for pain as much as killing.

Under the watchful gaze of armoured turrets and missile emplacements cunningly worked into the walls of ceramite and adamantium of Zeth's forge, these abominable killers formed up in three separate cohorts and marched on the Vulkan Gate.

Behind them came a shield-palanquin borne by towering, brutish Skitarii with grey skin and barbed armour. These monstrous, ogre-like warriors had been raised to such stature by more than simple gene-bulking and augmetics. Their bodies glistened and their veins pulsed with ruddy light, as though with an internal electricity.

Ambassador Melgator and Adept Regulus stood proudly atop the palanquin, clad in robes of midnight black with their hoods drawn up over their skulls. Melgator carried a staff of ebony topped with a snarling wolf s head and Regulus a staff of ivory topped with a skull of black obsidian.

The host of horrifically altered warriors parted to let them through, and Regulus halted the palanquin a hundred metres before the gate. The soaring adamantine glory of the Magma City's great portal was worked with silver cogs, golden eagles and lightning bolts, and it was opening.

As a widening bar of light split the two halves of the gate and the skitarii bristled with belligerent scrapcode, Regulus raised his arms and a streaming hash of lingua-technis, irregular and arrhythmic, blurted from his internal augmitters. His skull-topped staff crackled with corposant in time with his utterances and, one by one, the turrets and weapons platforms on the wall shut down.

The light of the city spilled outwards in a growing fan of orange light, throwing the shadow of the slender figure that walked from the city out before her in a thin line of black.

Adept Koriel Zeth swept her gaze over the assembled cohorts before fixing a distasteful stare on the two figures borne upon the palanquin, as though they were pestilential plague carriers begging entry.

'By what authority do you dare come to my city and demand my presence?' she said.

Melgator rapped his staff on the shield-palanquin, and its monstrous bearers carried it forward until it was less than twenty metres from Zeth.

canted Regulus in an all-channel squirt of binary.

Zeth winced. 'That's dirty code you're using, Regulus,' she answered, reading his identity from his fizzing electric field.

'On the contrary,' replied Regulus. 'It is pure code, as it was meant to exist before it was tamed and shackled to the will of flesh.'

'If you can't see the flaw in that line of reasoning then you are beyond the reach of my logic,' said Zeth. 'Now speak your piece and begone, I have work to do.'

'That will not be possible, Zeth,' said Melgator. 'We are here to escort you to Olympus Mons, where you will submit to the judgement of the Fabricator General.'

'My title is Adept Zeth, I believe I have earned it,' snapped the Mistress of the Magma City. 'And on what grounds do you dare arrest me?'

canted Melgator.

Zeth said nothing for a moment, letting the weight of the accusation settle on her.

Then she laughed, the sound echoing from the mountainside, carried far and wide across the length and breadth of the causeway.

'You mock these accusations?' snapped Regulus. 'Is there no end to your wickedness?'

'Oh, I absolutely mock them,' sneered Zeth. 'They are laughable, and if you weren't so blinded by what Kelbor-Hal has turned you into, you would see that.'

She swept an arm out, her gesture encompassing the gathered skitarii and Protectors. 'These monstrous things you bring to my forge… they are abominations of flesh and machine, freakish hybrids worse than the feral scrapshunt rejects that wander the pallidus. You have turned all that is beautiful of the Mechanicum into something dark, and it horrifies me that you cannot see it. So, yes, I mock your accusations, and more, I refuse to recognise your right to accuse me!'

'Then you refuse the summons of the Fabricator General?' asked Regulus, his code laced with eagerness to unleash the skitarii. 'You understand the severity of this action?'

'I do,' confirmed Zeth.

'Then we will take you by force,' said Melgator.

'You can try,' said Zeth.

Melgator aimed his staff at the walls and said, 'You will either come with us or you will be destroyed, Zeth. Link with your wall defences and you will see they are shut down. We control the code now.'

The three cohorts of skitarii began to march forward, flame lances, energy halberds and limb weapons arming in a flurry of crackling activations and clattering autoloaders.

'Not all of it you don't,' said Zeth as a pair of enormous mechanical forms marched into the gateway behind her.

Nine metres tall, the two Knights dwarfed the slight form of Adept Zeth, and the deep blue of their armoured plates shimmered with the reflected glow of the magma lake. The proud heraldry of a wheel encircling a lightning bolt was emblazoned on their shoulder guards, and they rode from the gateway to stand behind Adept Zeth with their energy lances and gatling cannons trained on the approaching skitarii.

Behind them, a dozen more Knights took position in line abreast to block entry to the Magma City with their majestic forms.

The march of the altered skitarii faltered and they milled in confusion in the face of the war machines, their pack-masters squalling for orders. Regulus emitted a panicked burst of code, the same mutant algorithms he had used to shut down the wall guns, but the Knights ignored him, their systems shut off to incoming code.

'This is Lord Caturix of the Order of Taranis,' said Zeth indicating the Knight on her left, its aggressive posture making no secret of its desire to wreak harm. 'And this is Preceptor Stator. Their order is an ally of this forge and if that flyer is not off my causeway in five minutes, they are going to ride out with their warriors and destroy you. Do you understand the severity of this action?'

'You dare threaten an emissary of the Fabricator General!' cried Melgator. 'You are a disgrace to the Mechanicum, Zeth!'

'Your assassin destroys the mind of my apprenta and then murders one of my acolytes, and you dare call me a disgrace to the Mechanicum?' snarled Zeth. She consulted her internal chronometer and said, 'Four minutes and forty seconds, Melgator. I suggest you get moving.'

'You will regret this,' promised Regulus. 'We will see your city in ruins and your legacy expunged from all records.'

The Knights took a step forwards, the hiss and clank of their metal limbs sounding dreadfully loud.

Melgator rapped his staff on the shield palanquin and, without another word, he and Regulus withdrew. A hurried code squeal recalled the skitarii and they marched with bitter disappointment back onto the heavy flyer.

As its flanks folded up and it took to the air, the lead Knight turned its cockpit towards Zeth and a noospheric link opened between them.

'You should have let me kill them,' said Lord Caturix.

'Maybe,' agreed Zeth, 'but I have a feeling you'll get another chance.'

'You think they'll be back?'

'I know they will, Lord Caturix, but next time they won't be so arrogant,' said Zeth. 'I have to send word of this to Maximal and Kane. Kelbor-Hal might come for them next, and I need to petition Legio Tempestus once more. I have a feeling we'll be needing some larger engines to defend the Magma City in the days ahead.'

'The support of Tempestus would be most welcome,' agreed Caturix. 'In the meantime, we will continue to stand with you. What would you have us do?'

Zeth watched the blue-hot glow of the departing flyer's engines.

'Prepare for battle,' she said.

The mag-lev speared into the tunnel and Dalia cried out in terror as the blackness swallowed them. She clung close to Caxton as the compartment lights flickered on and he put his arms around her, shrugging in puzzlement at her fright. Sickly fluorescence bathed the compartment, but the glass window was an unchanging black mirror. Dalia recoiled from its impenetrable depths, pushing away in terror from the wall with her sandaled feet.

Her breaths came in short panicked hikes and her muscles cramped painfully. She felt her flesh become cold and clammy as sweat filmed her skin. She could hear her heartbeat like the thunder of an industrial hammer and tears pricked at the corners of her eyes.

'Dalia?' asked Caxton. 'Dalia, what's the matter?'

'It's the darkness,' she gasped, burying her face in his shoulder. 'Its all around me!'

'Dalia? What? I don't understand!'

'What's the matter with her?' cried Severine.

'I don't know,' said Caxton, helpless as Dalia sobbed into his robes, her struggles becoming more and more hysterical.

'She's having a panic attack,' said Rho-mu 31, moving from the door of their compartment to stand in front of Dalia. 'I've seen it before in new arrivals to Mars. The red planet is so different, it sparks all kinds of reactions.'

'So what do we do?'

'There's nothing you can do,' replied Rho-mu 31. 'But I've dealt with this before.'

The Protector knelt on the floor between the seats and placed a hand on Dalia's shoulder, prising her away from Caxton and holding her twitching limbs. Her face was pale and streaked with tears.

'The darkness,' wept Dalia. 'I don't want to go into the darkness again. Not again!'

'What's she talking about?' said Severine. 'Make her stop!'

'Shut up!' hissed Zouche. 'Let the man work!'

'Dalia,' said Rho-mu 31, looking directly into her eyes. 'You are having a panic attack, but there's nothing to worry about, we're perfectly safe. I know you don't feel like that right now, but trust me, it's true.'

Dalia looked up at him and shook her head. 'No! No, we're not. I can't face it anymore. Please don't make me go back in there.'

'We'll be out of the tunnel soon enough, Dalia,' said Rho-mu 31, keeping his voice even and steady. She could feel his biometrics linking with hers, using his rigidly controlled metabolic mechanisms to try and stabilise hers.

'Breathe slowly,' advised Rho-mu 31. 'You're taking in too much oxygen and you don't want to do that, do you?'

She shook her head and forced herself to take longer, slower breaths. With the help of Rho-mu 31's bodily control she felt her heart begin to slow and the flow of blood to her muscles lessen.

Rho-mu 31 read her calming internal functions and nodded. 'Very good,' he said. 'These are all just physical symptoms of anxiety. They're not dangerous. It's an evolutionary reaction from ancient times, when humans needed all their wits about them for a fight or flight reaction. Your body has tripped that reaction, but it's a false alarm, Dalia. Do you understand that?'

'Of course I do,' said Dalia, between breaths and tears. 'I'm not stupid, but I can't help it!'

'Yes you can,' promised Rho-mu 31, and he knelt with her until the panic had passed, holding her hands and talking in low, soothing tones. He reminded her that she was travelling on a Mechanicum mag-lev, one of the safest means of transport on Mars, and that she was surrounded by her friends.

Eventually, his words and his gentle easing down of her metabolism calmed her to the point where her breathing rate was normalised and her heart rate, while still elevated, was less like the rattle of an automated nail gun.

'Thank you,' said Dalia, wiping her eyes on the sleeves of her robe. 'I feel so stupid; I mean we're only going through a tunnel. I've never felt claustrophobic or scared of the dark before.'

'Only since the accident in Zeth's inner forge,' said Zouche.

'Yes, I suppose since then,' agreed Dalia.

'Maybe you're feeling its fear,' said Severine, and they all turned towards her.

'Feeling whose fear?' asked Caxton.

'Whatever it is that's buried beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus,' said Severine, suddenly awkward with the attention. 'Look, she said she felt she linked with its mind, didn't she? I don't know about you, but if I'd been buried underground for that length of time and I got a brief glimpse of the world above, I wouldn't want to go back into the darkness either.'

'You may have something there, Severine,' said Caxton. 'What do you think, Dalia?'

Dalia nodded, unwilling to confront such thoughts head on after her panic attack. 'Maybe.'

'No, no, I really think Severine's onto something here,' said Caxton. 'I mean if—'

'Enough!' said Rho-mu 31. 'Save it until we're out of the tunnel. Zouche, how long until we reach the other side?'

Zouche hurriedly reconnected with the mag-lev's onboard cogitator and streams of data light cascaded behind his eyes.

Rho-mu 31 turned his attention back to Dalia and she smiled at him. 'Thank you,' she said.

He bowed his head, and though she couldn't see his face, she knew he was smiling back at her.

'Well?' asked Dalia in as relaxed a manner as she could muster. 'How long until we're clear of the tunnel, Zouche?'

Zouche frowned and moved his hands in the air, haptically shifting through holographic data plates only he could see.

'I'm not sure,' he said. 'According to the onboard driver-servitor we're slowing down.'

'Slowing down? Why?' demanded Rho-mu 31, and Dalia felt his threat auspex light up.

'Here, look for yourself,' replied Zouche, projecting the view of the tunnel from the hull-mounted picter onto the window once more. 'There's something ahead of us.'

They looked, and there was.

Rumbling along the floor of the tunnel towards the decelerating mag-lev was what looked like a tall robot of roughly spherical proportions mounted on a heavy gauge track unit. A pair of heavy arms were held vertically at its sides and a set of malleable weapon-dendrites flexed in the air above its shoulder guards.

Three glowing yellow orbs shone like baleful eyes in the centre of its mass, and, as they watched, its main arms locked into the upright position. As the mag-lev stopped, no one in the compartment failed to notice that each arm was equipped with an enormous weapon.

Even through the poor quality of the picter's image, Dalia could feel the strangeness and uniqueness of this machine's electrical field. Opening herself to the part of her mind that Zeth had called her innate connection to the aether, she reached out towards the machine, reading the heat of its internal reactor and the sticky web of dark, malicious sentience at its core.

Kaban… that was its name.

In the fleeting moment of connection, she read the memory of its creation and the killing of its former friend, an adept named Pallas Ravachol. With that death, the machine's murderous nature had been unleashed, and the primordial evil with which its masters had tainted its artificial intelligence now consumed it with dreadful, killing lust.

'Is that a battle robot?' asked Caxton.

'It's much more than a robot,' said Dalia, her eyes snapping open. 'It's something far worse.'

'What?'

'A sentient machine,' gasped Dalia, still reeling from the moment of connection to its grossly warped consciousness and the awful clarity of its purpose. 'It's an artificial intelligence and it's been corrupted with something vile, something evil.'

'Evil? That's nonsense,' said Zouche. 'What do machines know of evil?'

'What does it want?' asked Severine.

Dalia looked over at Rho-mu 31 in uncomprehending terror. 'It's here to kill me.'

The Kaban Machine opened fire and the driver-servitor's compartment disintegrated in a blitzing storm of las-fire and plasma bolts. Flames boomed from the ruptured energy cells and the darkness of the tunnel was suddenly dispelled.

Rho-mu 31 grabbed Dalia and hauled her from her seat as the machine rumbled down the tunnel, its weapon arms wreathed in halos of white fire as it systematically obliterated carriage after carriage. Designed to penetrate the hulls of battle tanks and overload the void shields of Titans, its sustained fire easily sliced through the sheet metal of the mag-lev's sides.

Caxton, Severine and Zouche needed no encouragement to follow Rho-mu 31 and blundered into the corridor beyond their compartment in terror. The noise from outside the mag-lev was deafening, thudding pressure waves of explosions laced with the squeal and hiss of impacting lasers. The bark of solid rounds and the whine of ricochets echoed from the tunnel walls. The mag-lev shuddered like a wounded beast, flames and smoke erupting along its length as it was systematically riddled with gunfire.

Dalia heard screams from further along the mag-lev as passengers were chewed up in the fusillade. The corridor was a mass of terrified people, its length choked with panicked bodies. Men and women screamed and clawed at one another as they fought to escape the approaching slaughter. Rho-mu 31 gathered Dalia into his arms and forced a path through the heaving, jammed mass of people fleeing towards the rear of the mag-lev.

bellowed Rho-mu 31 in the most belligerent form of cant, and such was the ingrained reverence for a Mechanicum Protector that the majority of people did exactly that. With his weapon stave extended before him, he pushed along the corridor towards an emergency exit.

Dalia looked over Rho-mu 31's shoulder, seeing terrified faces pressing against the wall of the corridor as they slammed fists, fire extinguishers or anything else they could get their hands on to smash the glass. Through the window on the door at the end of the corridor, Dalia could see bright flames and black smoke.

'Hurry!' shouted Severine. 'For the love of the Omnissiah, hurry up!'

A searing white lance of plasma cut into the carriage, sawing through the metal and glass like a laser saw. The beam instantly sliced two-dozen people in half and Dalia wept as she smelled boiled blood and scorched meat.

'Down!' shouted Rho-mu 31, bearing Dalia and Caxton to the floor of the corridor. Severine was quick to follow and Zouche had already been borne to his knees by the stampede. The incandescent beam zipped along the corridor, killing as it went, and Dalia watched in mute horror as severed limbs, cleaved bodies and disembodied heads fell to the floor.

She rolled onto her side as the deadly beam passed overhead and droplets of molten metal splashed the floor beside her. She cried out as one scorched a thin line down her arm.

'Sacred Fathers,' hissed Zouche, rolling onto his front as an explosion further back whipped the mag-lev like a sine wave. Everyone screamed as it was lifted from the rails with a screech of torn metal and a crackling burst of arcing electrics.

Dalia scrambled on her knees towards Rho-mu 31 as the carriage tipped from the track and her world spun crazily. It crashed to the tunnel floor and the windows blew out with the force of the impact. A blizzard of crystalline fragments rained down.

The breath was knocked from her and Dalia felt blood dripping into her eyes. A heavy weight pinned her and she blinked away red tears as she heard more deafening blasts of gunfire. She couldn't tell how close it was, but the stuttering, strobing flash of weapons fire felt as though it were coming from right outside their carriage.

Dalia fought to free herself from the weight pinning her to… the ceiling? Which way was up and which was down? She couldn't hear any screams. Had the Kaban machine killed everyone?

A man's body lay sprawled across her, or at least half of him, and she cried as she pushed his bifurcated body from her. The metal beneath her - the ceiling, she was sure of it now - was sticky with warm blood, and she whimpered in terror at the sight of heaped mounds of corpses filling the corridor. The iron stink of blood was thick in her nostrils and Dalia couldn't remember a more awful smell.

She retched dryly at the sight of so many dead, terrified and numbed by the horror of how quickly their grand adventure had come to such a bloody end. Despite the stink of death, she took a deep breath and looked for her friends amid the wreckage and carnage.

Dalia saw Rho-mu 31 lying further along the buckled corridor with a jagged spar of metal impaling his shoulder. The Protector's biometrics were fluctuating, but he was alive.

Zouche lay in a heap of bodies, his face a mask of blood, but she couldn't tell whether it was his or belonged to someone else. Caxton was just behind her, pinned to the floor by a metal door in the midst of a spray of glass fragments. His eyes were open and pleading, a low moaning issuing from between bloodied lips.

Severine lay beneath a nutrient dispensing machine that had torn loose from the wall, her arm thrown out before her and twisted at an unnatural angle. Her eyes were closed, but her pained expression and rapid, shallow breaths told Dalia she was alive.

The carriage was still, no straining bodies or panicked shoving, and the only light came from smashed lumen globes that sparked and stuttered in the half-light.

After such a tremendous cacophony of violence and noise, the silence that enveloped her was as welcome as it was terrifying.

Dalia began to crawl towards Rho-mu 31. He saw her coming and shook his head, placing a finger to the grilled mouthpiece of his helmet.

At first Dalia didn't understand.

Then she heard it.

Over the creaking wreckage and tinkle of falling glass, she felt the vibration of the heavy machine through the ground as it crashed metal and ruptured bodies beneath its tracks. Dalia craned her neck to look through the shattered window into the sputtering darkness of the tunnel, and fought down the urge to cry out as she saw the monstrous form of the sentient machine rambling towards where they lay.

She felt the crawling pressure of its corrupted mind as it swept the carriage for life signs, and heard the rattle of its autoloaders feeding its weapons fresh ammunition.

It drew nearer with every breath and in moments its auspex would register their presence. Then it would kill them.

Princeps Cavalerio finished processing the feeds inloading into his casket at a rate of over six thousand data packets per second. The Martian networks had slowly returned to normal after the scrapcode plague, the diligence of the code-scrubbers and magos probandi all across the red planet finally re-establishing communications and information exchanges.

Fresh reports, petitions and pleas for aid from forges far and wide were streaming into Ascraeus Mons through the vox, across the noosphere and via optic feeds.

It was a bleak picture they painted of the Mechanicum's future.

Cavalerio let his mind swim up through the reams of liquid information that flowed around and through him. He saw Agathe's face before him, and set the biometrics of his casket from processing to consciousness.

His famulous nodded as she read the information on the slate fixed to the side of the casket and retreated to a subordinate position behind him.

Cavalerio's Manifold senses processed his surroundings. His casket sat in the position of honour in the Chamber of the First, raised on a plinth before the mighty, towering form of Deus Tempestus, the First God Machine of the Legio.

Princeps Sharaq stood before him, waiting to hear whether he would give an order of execution. Though Sharaq had correctly appointed himself the acting Princeps Senioris of the Tempestus forces on Mars, he knew and welcomed the fact that any order to walk should come from the Stormlord.

Behind Sharaq were his Legio brothers, each awaiting the Stormlord's decision.

Princeps Suzak, the grim-faced hunter who commanded the Warlord Tharsis Hastatus, watched with an impassive eye, while Princeps Mordant of the Reaver Arcadia Fortis strained like an attack dog on a leash.

The Warhound drivers - Basek of Vulpus Rex, Kasim of Raptoria and Lamnos of Astrus Lux - paced like caged wolves, and Cavalerio rejoiced in the fearful power he saw before him.

'Stormlord,' said Sharaq. 'The princeps are gathered as you ordered.'

'Thank you, Kel,' said Cavalerio, before enhancing his augmitters to address the princeps of his Legio. 'I know you're all waiting to see whether I give an order of execution, but before I tell you my decision we need to understand what might happen as a result. I've given great thought to this, because a wrong choice will have consequences none of us can imagine. The forges of Mars burn in the fires of schism, and factional violence is reaching epidemic proportions all across our home world. So far, that violence has been restricted to the Mechanicum. None of the Titan Legions have yet initiated any hostilities, but it's surely only a matter of time until that happens.'

He could see their hunger to be unleashed, proud of their courage yet saddened by their eagerness to fight their erstwhile brothers.

'Before you all rush to your engines, gentlemen, let's be clear on one thing. If the Titan Legions march to war, there will be no coming back from it; we will have unleashed the fire of a civil war that will only be extinguished by the utter destruction of one side or the other. I have always sought to keep our Legio free from the insidious poison of politicking. I believe that the Titan Legions should remain true to their warrior ideals and not be instruments of political will, save that of the Imperium itself. Mars faces the gravest crisis in its long and glorious history, and warriors of honour and courage do not stand idly by in such times, they act. They stand firm in the face of aggression and in the defence of their allies.'

Cavalerio paused, allowing his words to hit home before continuing. 'The idea that one Legio would fight another is anathema to me, but I am not fool enough to believe that such a time is not coming.'

'It has already arrived,' said Princeps Mordant. 'Mortis is spoiling for battle.'

'Indeed,' said Cavalerio. 'The blatantly provocative walk on Ascraeus Mons by the Mortis engines was little more than an attempt to bait us into a shooting war we could not win.'

He stifled their denials with a harsh blurt of impatient code.

'I admire your bravery and faith in one another, but had we fought we would have died.'

'So what do we do, Stormlord?' demanded Princeps Suzak. 'Do we swallow our pride and do nothing as Mars tears itself apart? We are a force for stability, use us!'

'No, Vlad, we do not swallow our pride,' said Cavalerio. 'I will unleash the power of the Legio and we will rise to the defence of the ideals for which our world stands. The fury of Tempestus will fall upon the enemies of Mars and together we will scour them from the face of the red planet in a tide of fire and blood.'

'You walk with us?' asked Princeps Kasim. 'How? The tech-priests say Victorix Magna is beyond their ability to restore.'

'I know that, Zafir, but still I will walk with you,' declared Cavalerio. 'I will walk alongside you as I have always dreamed I would make my last walk, with the First God Machine of our Legio. I will become one with Deus Tempestus!'

Princeps Sharaq stepped forward. 'Then is the word given?'

'The word is given,' said Cavalerio. 'Tempestus goes to war.'

The machine paused in its advance, Dalia could hear the throaty growl of its power plant and the hiss of its hydraulics, and could feel the fizzing heat of its electrical field. She could smell the smoky residue of hard-rounds fire and taste the ozone from the plasma discharges.

Her every sense was magnified and she fought the urge to cry as she saw the ground up flesh worked into the grooves of its tracks. Rho-mu 31 slid his hand towards his weapon stave, but Dalia knew it would be no protection against such a destructive machine.

Caxton, Severine and Zouche trembled in fear, too hurt to move, too afraid to breathe.

Blood dripped from Dalia's brow onto her arm and she blinked away another drop as it formed on her eyelid. Shards of glass wobbled in the window frame before her and splinters fell like diamonds spilled from a pouch, landing with a tink, tink, tink.

Dalia held her breath as her fear rendered her immobile. Her limbs were frozen, she couldn't think properly, and the idea that she was going to die here was as ridiculous as it was horrifying. She didn't want to die.

Oh Throne, she didn't want to die!

She looked over at Caxton and the others, feeling a terrible guilt that she had brought them to this. And for what? Some half-baked theory that an ancient creature was buried beneath the surface of Mars?

Dalia wanted to laugh at her foolishness, thinking back to all the things she had read and transcribed - what seemed, and might as well have been, a lifetime ago - that she'd never now have the chance to see: the oceans of Laeran, the great cliffs of Charo, the planet forests of Ae.

A million wonders and miracles yet to be known; wonders the Expedition fleets were seeing on a daily basis.

Neither would she ever learn more of the Carnival of Light on Sarosh, or vicariously live tales of battle like the Victory on Murder or the vanquishing of the Hexen Guild. Likewise, the future paintings of Leland Roget, the compositions of Jeacon Poul and the sculptures of Delafour were all lost to her. Nor would she read any more of the poems by Ignace Karkasy that she had grown fond of, despite their slightly pompous tone.

This was no way to die, and the injustice and unfairness of it railed against the cruel fate that had brought her to this moment.

She closed her eyes, her fear of the dark vanishing instantly in the face of this new, immediate threat. In the face of death, her desire to live surged and her connection to the aether pushed aside conscious thought. Dalia felt her mind reaching out beyond her body as it had when she had seen how to construct the throne of the Akashic reader, but this time it saw further and deeper than ever before.

This time she saw into the heart of the Kaban Machine.

The connection lasted the merest fraction of a moment, but in that moment she saw the very essence of its existence.

She saw golden lines, bound together in a glowing web, each strand an answer to a question she hadn't yet asked. In this realm of the senses, she saw the light that was the mind of the Kaban Machine, a filthy, corrupted world of artificially created synapses and neurons.

Its auspex crawled over the wreckage like an invisible host of hungry spiders, and her flesh crawled with goose bumps as she felt the tread of a million legs across her skin. The machine's senses sniffed like a scavenger hunting out juicy morsels to devour.

Dalia's inner vision bored into the burning heart of the machine's consciousness, marvelling at the intricacy of the design, the complexity and magnificence of the work, and the infinite patience that had gone into crafting such a miraculous engine. A perfect meld of organics and artificial components had been used to fashion the Kaban Machine, and the genius of Lukas Chrom, the adept whose name and skill she could read in every aspect of the design, was a thing of beauty.

She saw the wonder of what Chrom had created and felt the horror of what it had been made to do, what its builders had done to it. They had made it kill a man it had called friend, and then exposed it to something so dark and so terrible that Dalia's floating consciousness recoiled from its warped malignancy.

Its memories were of feelings and emotions, the memories of a newly created intelligence too inexperienced to realise how such things could be manipulated by the unscrupulous. Corruption lay in the heart of its consciousness, like a bloated spider sitting at the centre of a web that spread its blood-hungry canker to everything it touched.

The folly of creating an artificial sentience, a forbidden science since a forgotten age of war, only to pervert it to the cause of murder struck Dalia as typical of mankind's skewed brilliance.

It was a machine that could think for itself and its first autonomous act was to kill.

Just what did that say about its makers?

For all its brilliance, however, it was still a machine and bound by the fundamental principles of machines. It still gathered information the way any other sentient being did, and such things could be fooled.

Though the infinitely dense strands of light that were its warped consciousness were corrupt beyond imagining, Dalia sought out the neural pathways and areas of the machine's brain that controlled its perceptions of the outside world. With a natural sense for such things, Dalia blocked the machine's ability to process the inputs coming from its auspex, and though she felt its sensory apparatus sweep over her body and those of her friends, the signals never reached the action centres of its consciousness.

As though sensing that something was wrong, the machine swept its auspex over the ruins of the corridor once more. She sensed its confusion.

It knows we're here, she thought. And it's going to keep looking until it finds us.

With another twist of its mind, Dalia created a tremor of life signs further down the mag-lev, and sensed its savage joy as its targeting systems acquired the false readings.

Thunderous, roaring, crashing gunfire erupted from its weapons, and Dalia felt the mag-lev shudder with the impacts. Las-fire and heavy, explosive rounds tore into the distant wreckage and obliterated the dead bodies within.

Its guns ceased fire and Dalia allowed the counterfeit life signs to blink out, feeling its feral glee as it revelled in the slaughter. The image of blood dripping from a brass throne onto a mountain of skulls filled its thoughts.

Again its auspex swept over the mag-lev. Dalia felt the machine's disappointment as she blocked its perceptions of them, and it concluded that it had killed everyone aboard.

Its task complete, the machine turned smoothly on its axis and moved off down the tunnel.

As it went, Dalia read an encrypted data squirt confirming the killings travel through the airwaves to its masters in Mondus Gamma and Olympus Mons.

Dalia kept her grip on its perception centres until it had travelled beyond the range of its targeting auspex before letting out a breath and opening her eyes.

The smashed interior of the mag-lev corridor came back into sickening focus and Dalia's stomach lurched as her brain struggled to adjust to the sudden transition from the domain of the mind to that of the physical.

The aftermath of the machine's attack - blood, burned plastic, seared flesh, and the sight of so many corpses - was overwhelming and she vomited copiously. Dalia coughed, retching and heaving until she felt her grip on reality solidifying.

She heard voices speaking in hushed and amazed tones that they were still alive, and she smiled, even though searing pain pounded inside her head.

'It's gone,' said a voice that Dalia recognised as Zouche's.

'I don't believe it,' said Caxton, his voice on the edge of hysteria.

'Thank Ares,' breathed Severine tearfully. 'Please? Can anyone help me? I think my arm's broken.'

'Dalia?' said Rho-mu 31. 'Are you all right?'

'Not especially,' she replied with forced levity, 'but I'll live, which is more than I thought I'd be able to say a few minutes ago.'

'Can you move?'

'Yes, but give me a minute.'

'We don't have a minute,' said Rho-mu 31. 'We have to move in case it comes back.'

'It won't come back,' said Dalia. 'It thinks we're dead, or at least it will for a while.'

'Then let's get out of here before it realises its mistake,' said Rho-mu 31.

In the upper reaches of Olympus Mons, Kelbor-Hal inloaded the encrypted data blurt from the Kaban Machine. Looking out over the surface of Mars he took a moment to survey the landscape, knowing that soon it would be transformed into something wondrous and new.

The power that boiled from the depths of the Vaults of Moravec was intoxicating, and every day brought fresh miracles as he and his fellow Dark Mechanicum - a term Melgator had coined - found new ways to bind it to the metal and gristle of their creations.

Weapons, servitors, praetorians and fighting vehicles were imbued with power, twisting them into new and terrifying forms that were divinely primordial in their savage beauty. Monstrous engines of destruction that would be the heralds of the new power rising in the galaxy were taking shape in Olympus Mons and the forges of those adepts and magi that had bound themselves to the cause of Horus Lupercal.

Billions toiled in the weapon shops and manufactorum to realise this grand dream of Mars resurgent, and none who touched the powers unleashed to roam throughout his forge remained unchanged.

Chants echoed from the darkened thoroughfares of Olympus Mons, mobs of hooded worshippers hunting down those who did not embrace the new way and feeding their blood to the hungry machines. Brazen bells tolled constantly and howling klaxons shrieked with the godlike power of the scrapcode.

The transformation of his forge was a magnificent thing, and Kelbor-Hal knew that what they did here would echo through the ages as the moment the Mechanicum was reborn.

He turned from the armoured glass of the viewing bay to face his followers.

Regulus, Melgator, Urtzi Malevolus, together with holographic images of Lukas Chrom and Princeps Camulos, stood attentively before him. He could see the cluttering lines of scrapcode infesting their augmetics.

He nodded towards Lukas Chrom. 'Dalia Cythera is dead. Once again, your assassin and thinking machine prove their worth.'

Chrom accepted the compliment with a short bow.

'Then it is time?' said Princeps Camulos. 'My engines long to make ruin of the Magma City.'

The bear-like Princeps Senioris of Legio Mortis was clad in beetle-black armour and Kelbor-Hal read the warp-enhanced aggression flaring from him in waves.

'Yes,' he said. 'It is time. Send word to the commanders of your allied Legios, Camulos. Tell their engines to walk and to crush our enemies beneath their mighty treads.'

'It shall be done,' promised Camulos.

Kelbor-Hal then addressed his fellow adepts of the Dark Mechanicum.

'This is a great day, my acolytes, remember it always,' said the Fabricator General. 'This is the day Mars and her forge worlds cast off the yoke of the Emperor's tyranny. Unleash your armies and stain the sands of our planet red with blood!'