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 Mechanic.u.m. The adept was swathed in thick red robes and augmented with a mult.i.tude 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 h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sively 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 a 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 a.s.sembling 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 Mechanic.u.m were unleashed, these weapons of the Dark Mechanic.u.m.

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 sc.r.a.pcode 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 antic.i.p.ation.

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 Mechanic.u.m 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 sc.r.a.pcode 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 sc.r.a.pcode 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 sc.r.a.pcode. The Magma City's links have proved to be resistant, as are those of Ipluvien Maximal and Fabricator Loc.u.m 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 Amba.s.sador 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' logic.

When the skies above Olympus Mons had raged and buckled at the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.p.a.ce appeared to be dimensionless. She had no sensation of up or down and no sense of the pa.s.sage 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 s.e.x 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 encompa.s.s 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 Pa.s.sED AROUND Mars in a mult.i.tude 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 sc.r.a.pcode 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 sc.r.a.pcode found each forge's weakest point and induced disastrous system failures at every turn.

At Sinus Sabaeus, the continent-sized a.s.sembly 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 Iaigo.

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 sc.r.a.pcode, and twenty thousand years' worth of knowledge was rendered down into howling nonsense.

Warning klaxons and shift horns blared as the sc.r.a.p-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 sc.r.a.pcode, which gathered momentum and ambition as it encircled the globe in an ever-tightening web of malice.

The chemical refineries of Vast.i.tas 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 sc.r.a.pcode 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 ma.s.s-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 sc.r.a.pcode 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 sc.r.a.pcode bypa.s.sed 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.