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  A dark, throaty chuckle sounded through the ether. “I’m sad it has come to this,” said the voice, and by turns it began to shift and alter. “I see that you are more the fool than I thought you were. A pity, Zellik. But I suppose I should have expected no better. You are like all the rest of them. Limited. Weak. Serving your Corpse-God blindly.” Zellik’s machine heart hammered against iron ribs and he felt the fear again. “Such a waste. Such a terrible, foolish waste…”

  New data flowed invisibly to the tech-lord; on the planet below and the gunskulls in close orbit, weapon discharges bloomed, throwing fire into the path of the Archeohort.

  * * *

  The Mechanicus construct cut a wide arc across the dayside of Dynikas V, retro-thrusters stabbing out tongues of nuclear flame, the cannon batteries atop its derricks and ringing its rail-nets aiming out in twenty different directions, seeking targets on the surface and amid the swarm of gunskulls.

  The orbit it had entered was not a stable one; the course it projected dipped low and into the edge of the atmosphere, passing through the day-night terminator zone and into the gloom of the planet’s dark side. But before it reached that point, there was a gauntlet of lances and missiles to run, a hard rain of particle beams, radiation and guided warheads. Nothing short of a battle-barge would have been able to weather such concentrated fire and survive—but still the Archeohort came on, every intelligent system aboard it blinkered and forbidden from dwelling on the fate before them, controlled by the iron will of Techmarine Mohl.

  The gunskulls were in rapture. Every shot they fired, every blazing ejection of energy, each one lit sparks of pleasure in their hobbled minds. Jars filled with cuts of human brain matter bubbled and frothed, filled with the joy of attack.

  Missile hits grew into spheres of flame expanding out to consume the brass limbs of the construct, entire derricks tearing apart, some severed and set tumbling away. Ragged cuts bled electricity and streamers of gas. Cannons howled in the darkness, the shock of their release echoing through the decks of the Archeohort, their silent payloads smashing gunskulls to fragments; but there were so many more of the satellites, and now they were jetting in from other orbits like starving carrion birds drawn to a fresh corpse.

  Zellik’s great ship began to shed parts of itself, cutting a line of shredded metal and spilled fluids across the sky. This was a vain, arrogant attack that only the most foolhardy, the most overconfident of commanders would ever think to undertake—that, or one with a death wish. The slow, ponderous guns down on the surface tracked and fired, fired and tracked, and each shot they released was a palpable hit. A smaller, more nimble ship might have managed to veer off; not the Archeohort. The construct’s path became confused, showing panic. The drive bells glowed bright, frantic to push the mass of the vessel away from the engagement zone; but as they worked, to the mad joy of the gunskulls, laser fire threaded across the void. Where it touched the hull of the Mechanicus construct, force field envelopes buckled and faded, allowing raking hits to cleave through armour and into the decks below. The corpses of vacuum-suffocated servitors followed the rest of the ejecta into space, bloated cyborg bodies adrift as their machine implants continued to work mindlessly at nothing.

  Falling and falling, the Archeohort’s main hull split open and imploded. In moments, even as the autonomic guns about its mass continued to fire back, the great construct entered its death throes. No longer a ship, now a collection of slow-dying wreckage as large as a city, the craft tumbled deeper into the gravity well of Dynikas V, towards the oxide-thick oceans that would be its grave.

  SIX

  Across the command lectern, strings of indicator lumes snapped from red to blue, each accompanied by the hollow chime of a long bell. The heavy, grinding echo of metal sealing tight against metal worked its way through the hull plates, and glass-faced dials buried their indicator needles at the active stop.

  “All decks report ready,” droned a servitor, oblivious to the vibrations thrumming through the plates beneath it. “Craft is sealed. In nomine Imperator, aegis Terra!”

  Suspended from the low ceiling, masks made of cracked ceramic, fashioned after the fat faces of cherubs, piped crackling hymnals from their open mouths. The chorus from their lips was just at the edge of hearing, the moaning and creaking of the Neimos a far more strident and powerful orchestra.

  Rafen’s eyes scanned the bridge of the vessel; each of the machine-slaves had dutifully wired themselves to their assigned command stations, the active webs of restraining harnesses tying them into place. The Blood Angel had briefly glimpsed a schematic of the Neimos, and knew that the bridge was one of a few compartments inside the submersible mounted on shock-resistant mechanisms, enveloped with arcane energy-shunt technology that would allow the crew to survive impacts that would otherwise turn a body into wet paste. The system was not powerful enough to encompass the whole of the craft, however.

  “Brothers, to your drop stations,” Rafen ordered, turning to the line of Space Marines ranged close by. “We have only one chance at this. Make no mistake, a single error will be enough to kill us all.”

  “Our lives are in their hands?” Sove jutted his chin at the servitors. “The bond-servants of a criminal conspirator?”

  “Try not to let it worry you,” Turcio replied.

  Puluo gave both Astartes a sharp look, and spoke for the rest of them. “We’re ready.”

  Rafen accepted this with a nod. “This is the point of no return, brothers. This day we venture into the realm of the unknown, down to a world teeming with aliens, a world blackened by the Mark of Chaos. Look to your battle-brothers, to your wargear, and you will prevail.”

  Noxx raised his helm up upon his fist. “For the Emperor and Sanguinius.” The Flesh Tearer’s words were a hard bark of fury.

  “Aye!” chorused the warriors.

  Rafen closed his eyes, and formed a silent prayer in his thoughts. Let us live, Great Angel, he said silently. Let us live so we can bring our quest to the end it deserves.

  The Archeohort came apart in blinding flashes of light. Severed conduits channelling rivers of electrothermal energy spat great gouts of colour as they vented. Whole decks made of stained glass, rescued from worlds razed to rock, were shattered into powder. Objects from thousands of planets and hundreds of histories were torn apart with the construct’s slow, agonising death throes. Storehouses of items never catalogued, things that were alien in origin or just alien in nature, were crushed under the weight of collapsing metal. Centuries of papers fuelled the fires that boiled bio-fluid meme-stores and cracked the delicate lattices of record crystals. Libraries of junk and bric-a-brac mixed with valuables and undocumented treasures were destroyed alongside one another. This great monument to one man’s greed and obsessive covetousness bled out into space, leaving a slick of shattered antiquities behind it. The lighter debris would slowly be gathered in by the planet’s gravitational field, drawn to a fiery death; the large fragments fell faster.

  They loomed large and hot against the dark of the void, thermal signatures burning brightly before the synthetic senses of the gunskulls. The weapons satellites poured more kill power into them, smashing the remains into smaller and smaller pieces.

  At the heart of this tumbling madness, the fractured core of the Archeohort, the single biggest shard of wreckage, continued its fall. At the leading edge of the jagged scrap of hull, panels blew free on explosive bolts. Behind them, a shape like a cudgel emerged, riding on a launch cradle, inching towards flight.

  Matthun Zellik felt his ship dying around him, and he would have wept bitter tears for it if he could have; but the pieces of his flesh that served that purpose had been cut out of him one hundred and fifty-seven point two years earlier, during an enhancement of self at the Morite Thane conclave. Instead, he allowed small loops of emotive emulation subroutines to turn around and around within a partition of his thoughts. Isolating his grief in this fashion allowed him to concentrate the rest of his intentions on freeing hi
mself from his confinement.

  The Techmarine Mohl looked into nothingness, the manifold mechadendrites falling from the connector implants along his neck waving and writhing. His single servo-arm was twitching, stuttering.

  Zellik’s metallic lip curled in disgust. In the privacy of his own thoughts, he so often ridiculed these Astartes half-breeds for their foolish behaviour. Space Marines—the whole and full variety—they were impressive tools to be sure, and to be respected in much the same way a common man would respect a vicious attack dog. But these so-called “Techmarines”… What were they? Abhumans playing at being adepts? Their Chapters sent them to Mars to learn the mysteries of the machine, but could they really ever hope to come anywhere near such a thing? Only the Mars-born could truly understand the scope of the Machine-God. Only the true bearers of the cog could dare to know the majesty of the Omnissiah.

  Zellik bent, affronted at the indecorous nature of what he was being forced to do, and let the micro-mandibles concealed in his mouth cut at the bond tying him to the Archeohort’s helm. He blotted out the screams of tortured metal and spitting fire, afraid to listen fully for fear he would learn just how wounded his precious vessel was. Instead, he concentrated on the cutting, filling his thought buffer with his dislike of Mohl. The Techmarine was clearly no scion of the Great Binary Lord; if he had been, he would have ignored Rafen’s insane orders to place the Archeohort on a suicide course. A true child of the Mechanicus would have placed his loyalty with Zellik…

  But even as that thought formed in his mind, Matthun Zellik experienced a moment of despair. Beslian was as Martian as he, and still his subordinate had put himself before the fate of the Archeohort and her precious relics. Zellik grimaced. No matter. This day’s events had revealed a truth to him. These fools thought themselves better than he, better than those whose sacred duty was to safeguard the lost technology of mankind, the mislaid future of humanity—without which they would surely perish!

  As it came to Zellik that these would be his dying moments, he formed the plan for what he would do. At last the tethers were cut, and with a grind of footgears, the tech-priest tore free, standing splay-legged on the trembling deck plates.

  For a moment, he was afraid the Astartes Mohl would turn and kill him; but Mohl’s eyes were blank and stared past, unseeing. Zellik knew that look—it was the great rapture of the network. Mohl was pushing himself to directly impose his will upon the myriad of servitors and thinking engines aboard the Archeohort, forcing them to obey his suicidal command. It was a task that even a tech-lord would have found taxing; Zellik’s nose wrinkled as his olfactory sensors picked up the rank odour of human sweat emanating from the Flesh Tearer’s exertions.

  Marshalling all his pistons and aligning his rod-like limbs, Zellik coiled and then sprang at the Astartes. Close to the armoured warrior, the hulking slab of a boltgun lay on the deck. The adept’s clawed fingers grabbed at the weapon and pulled. The bolter was heavier than he expected, and the weight of it was strangely balanced. He managed to drag it up into some pretence of a firing stance, steadying it against the frame of his carbon-steel hips. Zellik could hardly hold on to it, and was already regretting his rash action, even as his spindly digits reached for the trigger.

  “What are you doing, priest?” Amid the rumble and the madness of the destruction, Mohl’s voice was strangely loud. His words came slow and thick; the Astartes was trying to disengage from the Archeohort’s web of controls, but it was not a process one could manage swiftly. The servo-arm snapped at him.

  “You will pay for this,” Zellik spluttered. “I’ll make every one of you pay!”

  “No—” Mohl began; but then there was a massive, thunderous detonation of noise and light, and suddenly the tech-priest was on the deck several metres away, squealing with pain, a wracking ache making his limbs twitch.

  Zellik’s face was wet and the sensor-tongue in his mouth cavity flicked out, sampling the warm matter dotting his face. His internal scanners told him it was blood and brain material. Wiping himself clean with an arm from his servo-harness, Zellik looked back along the quaking deck plates and found Mohl’s body lying at an angle. Where the head had been, there was now a red ruin that was part of a jawbone; nearby, the big shape of the bolter sat upended, the muzzle smoking. He heard a gurgling sound that sickened him.

  Zellik looked at his clawed hands, rewinding the data-spools in his skull cavity. It had happened so fast. The weapon, the trigger… He had not been aware of placing so much pressure on it. Had his body not been so greatly improved and reinforced by the works of the Magos, he would never have been able to hold the great gun, much less actually fire it; even so, the recoil of the act had caused him great pain.

  The priest expected the fear to come back to him; instead there was a peculiar sense of elation. He had killed an Adeptus Astartes! Granted, one distracted and severely hobbled by his interface to the ship, but still…

  “I said I would make you pay,” he told Mohl’s corpse. “You dismissed me! But I won’t stop here!”

  A strange hysteria threatened to overcome him, and Zellik damped it down once more, walling off his emotional responses behind partitions of cold logic. He made it to the corridor beyond the bridge and hesitated. Only a short distance away, to the starboard, lay a compartment where a half-dozen saviour pods were nestled. He could make it there in moments, get away from the wreck before it was lost forever…

  “But why?” he asked the smoky air. “Why?”

  The Archeohort was dying around him, and suddenly it seemed churlish for him to outlive it, this grand monument to Zellik’s personal quest for glory. His place was here, with the collection. He had lived for it; it was right he died for it.

  “Not yet,” he snarled, his final scheme ringing clear and true in his thoughts. “Not yet!” Zellik shouted, racing away as fast as his piston-legs would allow, towards a hidden sanctum of his private museum—and the forbidden alien devices that lay within.

  The descent racks were arranged along the spinal corridor of the Neimos, resting on hydraulic rams and pressure cradles that would absorb the shock of a fall from orbit. Their usual functionality allowed them to contain three humans, but in this case each Astartes had a capsule to themselves. Two at a time, quickly and evenly, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers entered the pods and sealed themselves within. Rafen watched a claw-footed machine-slave connect bulbous pipes at each closed hatch, the tubes flexing and chugging as they pumped shock-absorbing bio-gels into the racks. The semi-solid matter would dampen the impact effects still further; the Space Marines, already cocooned inside the ceramite and plasteel cowls of their power armour, would know nothing until the drop cycle completed itself.

  The sergeant bent to peer through a glass portal into one of the pods. He made out a shape floating in the thick murk, robes open in the gel-mass, the clasping hand of an oxy-mask over a face. Beslian, like a fly trapped in amber.

  “If we perish, he’ll never know it,” ventured Noxx.

  Rafen looked up to see that he and the other sergeant were the last two remaining. Stepping carefully over the shuddering deck, the Blood Angel reached up and secured his helmet.

  “We will make it down alive,” he told Noxx. “I trust Brother Mohl’s judgement.”

  “Why?”

  It seemed an odd question; but then Rafen had learned by now that Brother-Sergeant Noxx sought challenge in everything. He gestured upward, as if towards the Archeohort’s bridge. “I trust him, because of what he has given up to see we finish the mission.”

  Noxx looked up and met Rafen’s gaze; for a moment there was a flicker of dark rage in eyes that were so often lifeless and hollow. “I’ll cut his name into a score of enemies and not think it too many. That will be a fitting tribute.” He climbed into his rack and pulled on the cowling. “See you in hell, Blood Angel.”

  Rafen stood alone on the deck and listened to the rumble all around him. Any moment now, the Neimos would break free and the fall would begin. A
ny moment now, and then their destiny would be in the hands of the fates. The mission at the mercy of powers greater than anything the Astartes could summon. He considered uttering another prayer, perhaps a litany of protection before entering the pod, and then dismissed the thought. No more words needed to be said. The Emperor was watching, Rafen could feel it. He closed his eyes and stepped into the rack, shutting himself inside.

  As the clamshell door locked into place, he closed his eyes; and so, he did not witness the sudden, brief fit that overtook the nearby servitor. The machine-slave twitched and frothed at the mouth, manipulators clenching and unclenching, thought-pattern indicators glowing brightly.

  In the next moment, the clanking spasm passed and the helot went back to its duties as if nothing had happened.

  At last, the Archeohort ended.

  The rain of fire from the gunskulls enveloped the spinning fragments of the construct and turned them into a storm of metal and glass, wood and meat, gas and plasma. Spread out over a thousand kilometres of stratosphere, crossing into the dark, heavy night of Dynikas V, the remains of the ship clawed into the atmosphere, pieces of the Mechanicus vessel consumed in the fires of re-entry, others surviving long enough to punch into the upper reaches of the planet’s thin cloud layers. These fists of torn iron, these jagged spears of wreckage, they were scattering themselves over the vast tracts of featureless rust-orange oceans. Some would be large enough to create tidal Shockwaves that would be felt on the other side of the world. Others would sink quickly into the abyssal depths of the Dynikan seas, and some few hammered at infrequent coral islands and atoll strings, letting the leaden oceans rise up and fill the craters they left behind.