The Beast Arises

Aloysian spread his servo-arms, taking in the industrial sprawl on all sides. ‘From everywhere,’ he said. ‘There are thousands of concealed access points just in this quadrant. The Mechanicus will reach what must be held, and provide no route for the enemy. So Mars will always be defended.’

The two forces came together in the Square of the Infinite Reach. Electro-priests and skitarii walked just ahead of Kastelan robots and their datasmiths. The robots were lumbering monsters, twice the height of their controllers. Their forms had a kinship to Space Marine power armour, but their heads were smooth eggs of metal, faces replaced with grey plates. Huge cannons rose over the metal skulls from the carapace: incendine combustors. Their power fists crackled with red and blue energy.

On the flanks rolled servitor tanks. The Kataphron Destroyers and Breachers were tracked behemoths, built up around things that had once been human. The only remnants were the shaved heads, snarling, bestial, pallid and blank-eyed, attached to machinic torsos wielding cannons and hydraulic claws.

Onager Dunecrawlers clanked up along the road at the rear of the column. Insectoid limbs carried reliquary hulls armed with eradication beamer cannons. The Dunecrawlers swivelled their weapons back and forth, aiming over the Mechanicus. Some were monitoring the Space Marine tanks. Others were tracking the movements of the gunships.

More forces were joining the Mechanicus column. Thane saw individual units emerge from manufactoria and hatches opening and closing in the surface of the roads and the square. Aloysian was correct. For the Adeptus Mechanicus, the terrain was porous, offering innumerable means of closing with an enemy. But to the foe, the ways would be shut or death traps. There was only one entrance that might conceivably be stormed and secured: the Gate.

The Tharsis Gate was a hundred metres high and wide, and at that it was half the height of the wall. An engraving of the divided skull of the Cult Mechanicus occupied the Gate’s entire surface. There was no seam, no sign of whether it parted down the centre or rose into the wall. Thane bore no illusions about opening it from the outside. The Fists Exemplar would have to pierce it.

The Mechanicus column grew as it advanced. It was a mechanised serpent of crimson robes, crimson plate, articulated metal limbs, pulsing energy and coiling mechadendrites. There was so little of the human in the display before Thane that war seemed not unthinkable, but inevitable. He thought of what Koorland had told him of Fabricator General Kubik: that the High Lord appeared to regard the ork attack on the Imperium with the detachment of an outside observer. He spoke as if Mars were not threatened, as if the orks were more fascinating than dangerous, and as if the Cult Mechanicus had an alliance of convenience with the Imperium, and nothing more.

At this moment, Koorland’s concerns had the ring of grim truth.

The Fists Exemplar and the Mechanicus stopped with less than fifty metres between them.

‘Point-blank range,’ Abbas voxed over a private channel.

‘Yes,’ said Thane. At this distance, the combined fire of the two armies could leave nothing but a huge crater. They were edging towards a catastrophe beyond war. ‘We must tread carefully.’ He switched to the command network. ‘We are not here for battle,’ he said. ‘Keep that foremost in your minds, brothers. There will be no weapons fire without my express command. The situation is fragile. We will not be the ones to engage first. But we will complete our mission.’

‘Chapter Master,’ Abbas said, ‘does the Mechanicus understand the concept of the bluff?’

‘Do you think that’s what we’re doing?’

‘No. But I hope our opponents are.’

At least Abbas had not used the word enemies.

From the towers of the manufactoria, and from the Martian war machines, vox-casters spoke from all sides. They surrounded the Fists Exemplar with the inhuman tones of Van Auken. They were the voice of a single priest, and that unity, amplified hundreds of times, gave the artisan the same authority as if he had been Mars itself.

‘In the name of the Omnissiah, go no further. Turn back now.’

If there was something Thane could count on in the present volatility, it was the precision of Van Auken’s words. He had never known an adept of the Mechanicus to use language carelessly. Van Auken had commanded, but he had not threatened. He was reserving a small space for manoeuvring.

Thane would have to make him back up. He used his vox-grille to speak, to broadcast his response to the Mechanicus warriors and to Van Auken. ‘We have our orders. They are the same as yours, from the Lord Commander of the Imperium, and in the name of the Emperor. Release Eldon Urquidex to our custody.’

‘In the name of the Omnissiah, go no further. Turn back now.’