She looked away from him as she saw an ochre-skinned vehicle emerge from the nearest structure, a tall tower of black metal, and make its way along the boom towards them. It moved on a number of thin, stilt-like legs, moving with a quirky, mechanical gait, like a stubby centipede. As it drew nearer, she saw the wide-bodied ma.s.s of a servitor fused and hard-wired into the front section where one might otherwise expect a driver to sit.

The vehicle came to a halt beside them, the mult.i.tude of legs twisting it around on its central axis and lowering it to the deck plates.

Rho-mu 31 opened a door in the side of the vehicle and indicated that Dalia should climb aboard. She stepped onto the centipede vehicle and took a seat on the metal bench along its side, feeling a thrill travel through her at the thought of making a journey on such an outlandish mode of transport.

Rho-mu 31 joined her, but the remaining Mechanic.u.m Protectors did not board.

*Where are we going?' asked Dalia, as the vehicle rose up onto its legs once again and set off with a scuttling, side-to-side motion towards the dark tower.

*We are going to see Adept Zeth,' said Rho-mu 31. *She is most anxious to meet you.'

*Me? Why? I don't understand, what does she want with me?'

*Enough questions, Dalia Cythera,' cautioned Rho-mu 31, not unkindly. *Adept Zeth does nothing without purpose and you are here to serve that purpose. What manner your service will take is for her to decide.'

The walking vehicle drew near the tower of black metal, and as Dalia looked back towards the gathering clouds, a sliver of fear wormed its way past her wonder at all the new and incredible sights.

She had been brought to Mars with a purpose in mind, but what might that purpose be and would she live to regret the journey?

The shadow of the tower swallowed her, and Dalia shivered despite the awful heat.

MAVEN'S FIRST WARNING was the transformer exploding in a cascade of flames and whipping electrical discharge. A hammering volley of laser fire, like a hundred lightning bolts ripping from the rocks, sawed through the looped coils of metal and liquefied them in an instant. His display dimmed to protect him from blindness, but before the transformer blew, he saw the outline of the aggressor.

Easily as huge as Equitos Bellum, it was spherical and heavily armoured, a pair of monstrous weapon arms at its sides and a myriad of flexible, metallic tentacles crouched over its shoulders like scorpions' tails.

A trio of convex blisters glowed like baleful eyes on its front, a fiery yellow glow burning from them with a hateful, dead light. The white heat of the explosion obscured the unknown attacker, and by the time the glow had diminished and the Knight's auto-senses had recovered, the war machine had vanished.

With a thought, Equitos Bellum was on a war footing, weapon generators firing from idle to active, and the high-energy cells that drove his Knight switching to battle mode. He immediately stepped his Knight to one side, crouching low as he saw scores of figures pouring from the rocks with weapons raised.

His eyes narrowed as he recognised them as Protector squads, servants of the adepts of Mars. Things were really getting out of hand.

*Stator! Cronus! Are you getting this?'

*Affirmative,' barked Stator. *Engage enemy forces at will a We will be with you directly.'

*Enemy forces?' hissed Maven. *They're Protectors!'

*And they are attacking a facility we are duty bound to protect. Now fight!'

Maven cursed under his breath and shrugged, the huge bulk of Equitos Bellum attempting to match the gesture as he marched the machine into battle. He leaned forward in his command seat, lifting his arms and twisting his head as he sought out the enemy war machine.

What was it, he wondered? Some new form of battle robot or servitor-manned automaton?

Maven shivered as he remembered the dead light in the machine's sensor blisters, feeling as though it had been looking at him, a.s.sessing him and then dismissing him. That thought alone angered him and he could feel the intemperate fury of Equitos Bellum meshing with him in a desire to do harm to the attackers.

The Protectors in grey cloaks were advancing with relentless pace through the reactor complex, gunning down unresisting servitors with quick bursts of laser fire, and engaging Maximal's Protectors as they sought to defend their master's holdings.

Maven unleashed a torrent of las-fire from his right arm and the ground erupted in a storm of metal and earth. The ruin of the enemy corpses geysered upwards, a knot of attackers reduced to puffs of exploding meat and boiled blood.

A flurry of gunfire rippled towards him, and he flinched as he felt a power field flash out of existence. Like a t.i.tan, a Knight had a finite bank of energy shields to protect it, but where a t.i.tan's reactor could replenish its shield strength in time, the Knight's battery could not. Equitos Bellum was effectively immune to most individual weapons, but the Protectors were combining their fire with accuracy of timing that spoke of a communal battle-link.

Another shield winked out of existence and Maven turned his war machine to face the new threat: a cadre of Protectors armed with long-barrelled high-energy weapons. Maven saw silver bands around each Protector's skull, recognising the hard-wired component of a targeting web.

He stepped sideways as a blistering beam of light leapt from each of the Protectors' weapons and achieved confluence where he had been standing not a moment before. He had seconds to act.

Maven's weapons blazed in a hurricane of light, enveloping the Protectors in a firestorm that obliterated them in an instant and left virtually no remains. He pushed onwards, past the flaming wreckage of the transformer as it spat arcs of lightning and secondary explosions detonated within its ruined shape.

Where the h.e.l.l had the war machine that had done this gone? And where in the name of Taranis were Stator and Cronus?

An explosion mushroomed skyward from deeper within the complex, and Maven turned Equitos Bellum towards it, the heavy, thudding strides of the Knight shaking the ground with the weight of its tread. Another explosion roared and Maven guided his Knight around the curve of the reactor dome to see his foe with its back to him, unleashing solid spears of plasma flame that ripped through the armoured skin of the fusion reactor's dome.

The machine's bulk was enormous, almost as wide as it was tall, and it was equipped with a fearsome array of weapons a some Maven recognised and some that were a mystery to him. Where a Knight's mode of locomotion was its legs, this machine was mounted on a heavy track unit, blood and oil coating it where it had crushed unfortunate servitors beneath its bulk.

Sheets of molten armour cascaded like burnt paper from the flanks of the reactor dome, and Maven saw it wouldn't be long before the shielding around the caged fury of the fusion reactions within would be breached. Screaming sirens and flashing emergency lights warned of impending doom.

Despite the heavy crash of his Knight's footfalls, Maven didn't think his foe knew he was there. Maven siphoned power from non-essential systems as he prepared to open fire.

One of the metallic weapon-tentacles swivelled around on its mounting, and Maven had the sick feeling that it was looking right at him. Instantly, the rest of the weapon arms not already reducing the armour plating on the reactor to vaporised slag whipped around to face him.

Maven opened fire at the same time as the attacking war machine, his lasers impacting on a number of power fields before tearing one of the weapon arms from its mounting. The return fire struck Equitos Bellum full in the chest, collapsing the last power field and ripping through its armour. Agony roared up through the Manifold and Maven screamed, his hands jerking towards his chest as though the wound had been done to his own flesh.

The Knight staggered, and Maven fought to control its motion through the mist of jarring pain that seared through his every nerve-ending. He wrenched his consciousness from the damage done to Equitos Bellum and felt his vision clear as he saw the enemy war machine preparing to fire again.

Maven sidestepped and lowered his shoulder as another rippling beam of light seared towards him, burning through the edge of his shoulder armour. He flinched, but the damage was superficial and he locked in with his weapon arm, unleashing a stream of laser fire at his enemy's back.

*Got you!' he shouted as the impacts marched over the machine.

The shout died in his throat as he saw that his shots had done absolutely no damage.

A rippling sheath of invisible energy surrounded the machine where none had existed a moment before. Only one explanation presented itself.

The machine was void protected.

*d.a.m.n it,' he hissed and his hesitation almost killed him as the machine spun around on its axis and took time out from its unravelling of the reactor's armour to fire on him.

Dazzling lasers sleeted past him and Maven desperately walked his Knight back out of the line of fire. Flames boomed to life around him as fuel stores exploded, and he felt the heat wash over his mount. A lucky shot grazed the pilot's compartment and a sharp crack sliced down through his vision.

Maven screamed in pain, his hand reaching up to his eyes where it felt as though a hot needle had been shoved through to the back of his skull. His vision blurred, but he kept moving, backwards and from side to side, to throw off his a.s.sailant's aim.

Fresh streams of laser fire seared the air around him, but none touched him, and as the pain of Equitos Bellum s wounding diminished, he dodged the machine's incoming shots, its fire patterns following textbook sweeps.

But Raf Maven was anything but textbook.

He swung his Knight around the corner of the reactor, sweat streaming down his face and a thin trickle of blood dripping from his nose.

*Stator! Cronus!' he yelled. *Where in Ares' name are you?'

Then the reactor exploded.

THE STILT-WALKING vehicle moved through a city of wonders and miracles.

Everywhere Dalia looked she saw something new and incredible. Once lost in the midst of the towers and forges, she realised she had never seen anything like the domain of Koriel Zeth, its design and scale quite beyond anything she had imagined before. Though the Imperial Palace on Terra was much, much larger, she appreciated that the Emperor's fastness was not so much a piece of architecture, but rather a handcrafted land ma.s.s built upon the world's tallest mountains.

Even on the rare moments she had been permitted to venture beyond the confines of the Librarium, she had only ever seen a fragment of the palace's majesty, but this place she had seen in its entirety.

Even then, she suspected that what she had seen from the air wasn't the whole story.

Rho-mu 31 kept his counsel throughout the journey, content to watch the spires and smoke-belching furnaces pa.s.s without comment. Nor was this a city without an organic component, for thousands paraded through its razor-straight thoroughfares and shining boulevards.

Hooded menials, grey-skinned servitors and glittering, holo-wreathed calculi mingled on the metal streets of the Magma City. Robed tech-adepts moved like royalty through the crowds, carried on floating palanquins or wheeled chariots of golden metal, or borne aloft on what looked like gilded theatre boxes with slender stilt legs. All of them bore the number grid symbol of Adept Zeth somewhere about their person.

How any of them didn't collide was a mystery to Dalia, though she presumed that each one would have some kind of onboard navigational system, which linked to a central network that monitored speeds, trajectories and potential collisions.

She shook her head free of the thought and forced herself to concentrate on enjoying the journey. Too often she was being distracted when she saw something new and incredible. Her thoughts would seize on this unknown factor, searching her memory for something similar before sending the creative part of her mind into a freewheeling spin as she attempted to account for the technological explanation of this new phenomenon.

They were heading for the centre of the Magma City, that much was obvious, the unmoving, unblinking servitor fused with the vehicle's control mechanisms conveying them unerringly through the heaving ma.s.s of bodies.

Their course took them onto the golden boulevard she had seen from the air, its sides lined with statues and thronged with robed acolytes. At the far end, Dalia saw a towering structure of what looked like bright silver or chrome.

As if fashioned from precisely machined blocks of silver steel, the forge was etched with geometric patterns like those of a circuit diagram, though Dalia had no idea what manner of circuit was described in its design. The servitor increased the speed of their vehicle and the enormous building soon grew in stature until Dalia's neck hurt with craning to look up at its blocky enormity.

A portion of the wall at the base of the forge slid apart and sections of the building seemed to retreat within its structure, forming a gleaming ramp that led up to a vast portico halfway up the building's side.

Dalia gripped the handrail as their vehicle began the ascent, looking behind her as the ramp disappeared as soon as they pa.s.sed. The portico loomed large above them and now she truly appreciated how enormous it was, each column fashioned in the shape of an enormous piston and capped with cog-shaped capitals.

The entire building was designed as if it were a moving machine, and for all Dalia knew, perhaps it was.

At last the vehicle levelled out and the clacking of its many legs ceased as it came to a halt on the portico's wide plinth. The floor was milky white marble with dark veins running through it, and the columns towered above her. The underside of the pediment was decorated with unknown equations and diagrams picked out in glittering mosaics of gold. The sheer visual splendour was overwhelming.

A wall of bronze doors led into the mighty structure. All were open and from them poured a host of robed figures. Each wore its hood drawn forward to cover its head and each wore the number grid of Adept Zeth as a veil. Many carried strange devices in open boxes or upon their backs.

Leading the figures was a tall, slender adept with a lithe, muscular physique and a cloak of golden-red bronze that billowed behind her in the swirls of hot air.

Without introduction, Dalia knew this must be the Mistress of the Magma City: Adept Koriel Zeth.

Her body was sheathed in a flexible skin of bronze armour, her attire more like that of a warrior woman than a master of technology.

Her features were invisible, hidden behind a studded head mask and opaque goggles. Puffs of steam exhaled from a rebreather mask and a skirt of bronze mail hung low over her shapely armoured legs. Though her body armour obscured all traces of Zeth's humanity, there was no doubt as to her s.e.x.

Every curve and every plate of armour had been designed to enhance her natural form, her slender waist, the curve of her thighs and the swell of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Fully a third of a metre taller than Dalia, Adept Zeth approached, and a delicate mist of atomised perfume came with her.

She leaned down to stare at Dalia, the glossy black orbs of her goggles like those of an insect regarding some interesting morsel that had just wandered into its lair. Zedi's head c.o.c.ked to one side and a burst of static hissed from the bronze mesh to either side of her rebreather.

Moments pa.s.sed before Dalia realised that the static had been directed at her, a blurted hash of machine noise intelligible to the binaric fluent.

*I can't understand you,' she said. *I don't speak lingua-technis.'

Zeth nodded and her head twitched as though a switch had flicked inside it.

*What relationship does the ideal gas law represent?' asked Zeth, her voice rasping and the words sounding as though they had been dredged up from a little used repository of linguistic memory.

Of all the welcomes, this was one Dalia had not antic.i.p.ated. She closed her eyes, casting her mind back to one of the first books she had transcribed in the Librarium, a textbook recovered from beneath a ruined tech-fortress of the Yndonesic Bloc.

*It describes the relationship between pressure and volume within a closed system,' said Dalia, the words recited by rote from memory. *For a fixed amount of gas kept at a fixed temperature, the pressure and volume are inversely proportional.'

*Very good. I am Adept Koriel Zeth. And you are Dalia Cythera. Welcome to my forge.'

*Thank you,' said Dalia. *It's very impressive. Did it take long to build?'

Zeth looked her up and down, the sound of electronic laughter crackling from her voice unit. She nodded. *It did indeed. Many centuries of work were needed to build this forge, but even now it is not complete.'

*It isn't? It looks complete.'

*From without, perhaps, but within there is much yet to be achieved,' said Zeth, her delivery growing more fluent as she spoke. *And that is where you come in.'

*How do you even know me?'

*I know a great deal about you,' said Adept Zeth, looking at the s.p.a.ce above Dalia's head. *You are the only daughter of Tethis and Moraia Cythera, both deceased. You were born in medicae block IF-55 of the Ural Collective seventeen years, three months, four days, six hours and fifteen minutes ago. You were trained to read and write at age three, indentured to the Imperial Scriptorium aged six, and trained in the art of transcription aged nine. You were apprenticed to Magos Ludd aged twelve and a.s.signed to the Hall of Transcription aged fifteen. You have six commendations for accuracy, twelve citations for inciting behaviour deemed to be incompatible with working practices and one instance of imprisonment for violating the Laws of Divine Complexity.'

Dalia looked up, half-expecting to see illuminated letters displaying her life story for Adept Zeth. She saw nothing, but it was clear from the tone of Zeth's voice that she was reading these facts from somewhere.

*How do you know all that?' she asked.

Zeth reached down and brushed a metallic fingertip across Dalia's cheek, and she felt a warm glow as the electoo implanted beneath her skin upon her induction to the Hall of Transcription came to life. She reached up and placed a hand on her skin.

*You can read my electoo?'

*Yes, but I can discern much more than simple biographical knowledge,' replied Zeth. *All data can be read, presented and transferred with a glance. Though invisible to you, I see a liminal skein of data filling the air around you, each ghost of light a fact of your life. I can see everything about you, all the things that make you a person in the eyes of the Imperium.'

*I've never heard of anything like that.'

*I am not surprised,' said Zeth with a trace of pride. *It is a function of data retrieval and transfer that I have only recently developed, though I have great hopes for its eventual employment throughout the Imperium. But I did not bring you to my forge only to impress you with my technological developments, I brought you here because I believe your understanding of machines and technology runs parallel to mine.'

*What do you mean?'

*The Martian Priesthood is an ancient organisation and is learned in the ways of technology, but our grasp of such things is limited by blind adherence to dogma, tradition and repet.i.tion. I believe that our future lies in the understanding of technology, that only by experimentation, invention and research will our progress be a.s.sured. This view is not widely held on Mars.'

*Why not? Seems perfectly sensible to me.'

Zeth made the crackling, static laugh again. *That is why I sought you out, Dalia. You have a skill I believe will prove very valuable to me, but one that others will fear.'

*What skill's that?'

*You understand why machines work,' said Zeth. *You know the principles by which they function and the science behind their operation. I accessed the schematics of what you did to your cogitator station and followed the methodology you employed upon the circuitry. It was quite brilliant.'

*I didn't really do anything special,' said Dalia modestly. *I just saw how I could make it work faster and more efficiently. Anyone could have done it if they'd put their mind to it.'

*And that is why you are special,' replied Zeth. *Few could have made the mental leaps to see the things you saw, and even fewer would dare. To many of the Martian Priesthood, you are a very dangerous individual indeed.'