Thane smiled admonishingly at Vangorich. ‘You are not stupid, Vangorich. I suspect you have already guessed. Although I am no longer a Fist Exemplar, I owe an honour debt to see that the Chapter does not die. We go to Eidolica one final time. It is as good a place to start my crusade as any.’
‘Are you sure it is the best course of action, my lord? There are systems of higher strategic value nearer and in greater need.’
‘The sons of Dorn do not abandon each other and they do not neglect their legacy. I have an obligation. I do not expect you to understand.’
Vangorich laced his hands together in the deep sleeves of his robes. He was treading dangerous ground. ‘So might I ask, my lord, have you had any word from your brothers of the Fists Exemplar?’
That made Thane uncomfortable. His fists clenched. ‘None. They were last seen at the Vandis System. I guess your opinion, Lord Protector. You suggest they are dead, but I saw them make the Mandeville point myself, and so I cannot accept that First Captain Zerberyn’s force is destroyed until it is presented to me as a solid fact. They are unaware of it, but they are the Fists Exemplar now. It would be a tragic irony if my resurrection of the Imperial Fists doomed my original order to extinction. That is a possibility that I have to consider. If so, a new brotherhood shall take Eidolica as its home. If one Chapter can be resurrected, so might others.’
‘I understand. If more of us showed such solidarity then maybe this would not have happened.’ Vangorich stood a little taller, presenting an aspect of himself he usually hid by careful posture and body language. Maximus Thane knew Vangorich was dangerous, but for a moment he saw clearly who he was dealing with: an intelligent, careful man, the worst kind of killer. ‘I will oversee the rebuilding of Terra. I shall ensure your wishes are adhered to, my lord.’
Thane looked out through the armourglass over the spires and peaks of Phalanx. ‘I am trusting you to make this work, Vangorich. You have implied many times that one man might make a better ruler than twelve Lords. I honestly have no idea if you truly wished Veritus to be that man. It does not matter. Now is your chance to prove theory. Lead them wisely, and remember Kubik is not the only High Lord I would return to Terra to replace.’
Chapter Five
The fate of Ullanor
Mariazet Isolde wore the shape of a shuffling Adeptus Mechanicus menial priest convincingly. She hobbled her way through red-lit decks crammed with servitor crew, her false implant broadcasting forged Adeptus Mechanicus identification codes. She had Yendl to thank for those. Without the Temple Vanus infocyte, the cell would have been discovered a long time ago. Isolde missed her expertise; operating on Mars had become difficult since Yendl’s death.
She wasn’t confident she could maintain the pretence, but her death did not matter. Only the mission did. She was to bear witness to the destruction of Ullanor from within the Mechanicus ship.
The Ark Majesty was immense, a huge inverted pyramid staffed by hundreds of thousands of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests and their lobotomised slaves. No one paid her any attention. She went at a measured pace, not wishing to bring attention to herself as a shirker or someone in an unusual hurry. The command deck was her goal. Isolde was circumspect in her work, and she was on her highest level of alert.
Clanking men-machines lumbered past her, wheezing aseptic breath. Choirs of lowly adepts sang hymns to placate the spirit of the Ark Majesty’s many machines while higher-ranking priests conducted inscrutable rituals. Isolde walked by.
She took the least-used ways upward, transit tubes used mainly by servitors. Their blank-eyed stares passed over her with no more interest than if she’d been an empty fuel canister. Her codes, marking her as a member of Kubik’s personal household, gave her access to most areas of the ship, except the command deck. Getting in there was the difficulty.
The fabric of the Ark Majesty thrummed to the song of titanic energies as the Adeptus Mechanicus prepared for the conclusion of their Grand Experiment. Not, as secretly planned, the removal of Mars from the Sol System, but the destruction of the orks’ capital, a fitting test of the new and terrifying matter displacement technologies plundered from the greenskins. Odd whoops and growls sounded from vents and shafts as she passed them. The vibrations of the ship changed in frequency and violence as the vast banks of teleporters grafted to the Ark Majesty’s frame were cycled up and down in repetitive test runs.
She neared the centre of the vessel where the command deck was situated. The Adeptus Mechanicus favoured burying their command sections deep in their craft for maximum survivability. There was a paucity of windows on an ark vessel. All sight was provided remotely, by the grace of the Machine-God. A corridor with a pronounced declivity led down to the cradle housing the command decks. She slowed. Her identity would take her no further.
Streams of adepts went to and fro, passing from side rooms and engine halls to join the ceaseless flow of augmented humanity. The number of servitor crew declined as the number of adepts increased, until close to the great reinforced blast doors of the command deck the tech-priests outnumbered the mindless cybernetic constructs three to one. Those servitors that were present stamped past in large groups headed by genetors-primus. A few others were heavy combat drones stationed at strategic points. These comprised the torsos of dismembered men plugged directly into track units, their arms replaced by potent weaponry.
She scanned the crowds until she found what she was looking for. A middle-ranking magos metallicus transmechanic with a face of flesh. It was crucial her mark have no obvious facial augments; that would be too hard to mimic. On a starship the metallicus’ principal duties were confined to repairs. A busy man in a battle, but today he would have little to do. He headed with purpose down a narrow gangway. Isolde followed, striding after him as if she had always intended to go that way.
The gangway opened up into a large, tiered hall. On each level the walls were studded with heavy copper handgrips set in pairs. As she followed the magos, a troop of electro-priests came marching into the hall, singing devotional cant to the Body Electric and the Motive Force. They filed in, taking up station by the contacts and grasping them with both hands. Accidental electrical discharge buzzed and filled the space with the smell of sharp ozone.
The magos metallicus strode on through another, even bigger space, filled to within half a metre of the walls with a gigantic machine from whose depths multiple lights shone. Tech-priests moved painfully around the outside, sometimes on their knees, mechadendrites and ancillary limbs snaking out to make minute adjustments. Past this, the magos metallicus turned into a vestibule sandwiched between the corridor and a third chamber. Through the doorway into this further hall Isolde glimpsed tall plasma coils wreathed in crackling loops of green energy, and she had the notion that she looked upon technology engineered from the greenskins’.
The tech-priest went into a small door set into the wall of the vestibule. Isolde ducked through and found herself in a small storeroom hanging with neatly bunched cables labelled carefully in lingua-technis. She moved so quietly that the man did not notice her at first. When he selected a cable, turned round and saw her, the flesh of her face was already transforming itself into a passing resemblance of his own. She cast her hood back so he could see her features run. He let out a surprised electronic burble from a vox-box implanted in his neck at the sight of her.
Isolde cursed inwardly, she had not seen that augmentation. Most of the tech-priests had such things to allow them to speak the machine language, but they were not always so obvious. She killed him quickly, her exotic sword springing out from its housing on the back of her arm and taking him through the eye. Ignoring the crawling feeling as her face rearranged itself, she stripped the magos’ outer garments off and replaced them with her own, then, kneeling, pulled out a sharp knife and began to cut. His intelligence core was easy to find in his skull, which was a small blessing, for the cybernetics of the Mechanicus followed no standard pattern and it could as easily have been implanted in his leg as his head. She wiped the blood off her hand, sheathed her knife and paused. He still held the cable in his dead hand. He’d evidently got it for something, and so she spent a valuable moment debating whether to take the cable or not. In the end, she decided to leave it behind.