Part 27 (1/2)
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 impa.s.sive eye, while Princeps Mordant of the Reaver Arcadia Fortis strained like an attack dog on a leash.
The Warhound drivers a Basek of Vulpus Rex, Kasim of Raptoria and Lamnos of Astrus Lux a 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 Mechanic.u.m. None of the t.i.tan 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 t.i.tan 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 t.i.tan 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 G.o.d 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 gla.s.s 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 a what seemed, and might as well have been, a lifetime ago a 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 vanquis.h.i.+ng 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 vanis.h.i.+ng 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 Akas.h.i.+c 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 b.u.mps 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 fas.h.i.+on 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, cras.h.i.+ng 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.