‘Yes, lord?’ came the grating voice of a duty officer, though it wasn’t one
of Courvain’s.
‘Spinoza, Luce,’ she said, coldly. ‘Code sequence beta-beta-chimeric.’ There was a click, the sound of shuffling parchment, the clunk of an algorithmic engine completing.
‘Very good, lord. Audex cipher accepted. I shall put you through.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Crowl and Revus took a Shade from Courvain’s fleet and piloted it north west, out of Salvator and out towards the approaches to Skhallax. As they gained loft, a scatter of dirt-caked spires ran away towards the gradual rise that culminated in the Palace, a faintly visible smudge of darkness on the horizon. The night’s fires had gone out by then, but the last remnants of smoke twisted up into the heavens like greasy tresses.
Gun-barges now hovered over all the major thoroughfares, their bolter banks steadily tracking anything within range. They were ugly things — old hulls, dragged out of semi-dormancy for counter-insurgency work with weapon-racks capable of levelling city blocks. Higher up, amid the tox-haze, Imperial Navy fighters were busy blank-strafing imaginary targets, sweeping back and forth ahead of the controlled airspace of the Palace itself in tight-held formations.
The cloud mantle had darkened, curdling like spoiled milk and twisting in eerie patterns where the hot wind ruffled it. Flickers of pale lightning danced along the horizon. The air felt heavy, close, ripe to detonate. The soaring faces of oratories and cathedrals gazed out over the fervid atmosphere, their gables studded with rows of eyeless statues. Those static figures had seen it all — the invasions, the reconstructions, the purges, on and on, cycling across the millennia in a black comedy of repetition.
Revus, at the controls, said nothing. Crowl, happy not to break the silence, prepared the Shade’s augurs for deployment. A dormant Gorgias hung back
behind the cockpit seats.
Soon the towers of Skhallax became visible through the murk, first as a series of dull red lights in the gloom, then in the stepped outlines of ziggurats and forge-temples. Temperature gauges in the Shade’s cockpit rose a little higher. Revus lowered his speed, brought the craft down a few hundred metres, hugging the shoulders of the hab towers.
The place was many hundreds of square kilometres across, a scar of off-world edifices intertwined with the jungle of habitation-blocks at its fringes. A confection of manufactoria, refineries and ritual sites for the worship of the Mechanicus’ strange theological construction the Omnissiah, Skhallax had risen up over thousands of years of alternating growth and stagnation, its great factories built atop the shells of older factories, its complex systems of cabling and pipework and power generators and heat exchangers patched and repaired but never fully replaced. Now most of the structure was deemed sacred, an ossified relic to be tended, not extended, and over the most recent centuries, in keeping with the long slide into decrepitude across the entire planet, it had begun to degrade into a swamp of corrosion. Its steep flanks remained caked in the dark red skin that all Martian architecture employed, though Terra’s grinding winds had bled most of the colour out of the highest walls, slowly eroding its distinctiveness and imposing its own uniform pall of pale grey.
The Shade’s chronos ticked over to midday, a time when favoured parts of the Throneworld experienced a modicum of filmy sunlight, but Skhallax remained dark. Churning fumes rose up around it like steadily intensifying layers of gauze, masking the full extent of the structures within. The earth trembled, as if massive hammers rotated in the deeps below. Flames writhed out of exhaust pits like the geysers of Old Earth, raging for moments, or hours, or days, before suddenly gusting out again.
At its heart, swathed by the roil and the tumult, jutted a cluster of monolithic columns, blunt-edged, brutal in construction, all bearing the Cog Mechanicus illuminated in bloody-edged lumen-glows. Aside from the Palace and the truly colossal halls of the Ministorum itself, no greater structure than Skhallax had been raised on this hemisphere of the Throneworld, a permanent reminder of the prestige of the Red Planet’s ancient rival hegemony.
They got closer. Crowl began to run low-level scans, cross-referencing the Shade’s records with data from the augurs. The site was so enormous that it was not obvious where to start looking, but even in such a place there would be limitations on the possible. Bringing down a sub-warp vessel of the Ohtar’s void-profile required an appropriate landing stage, and that was not something Skhallax had in abundance, for it had never been designed as a space port. There were a number of likely locations returned by the augurs, though one stood out — a long way from the red-eyed centre, out west past a hunchbacked line of refineries, lodged amid what looked like semi-abandoned works on the enclave’s border.
‘Silence now, I think,’ said Crowl.
Revus swung the Shade down lower, activating quiet protocol. The gunship’s lights blinked out, its auspex-baffles activated, its engines throttled back to a whisper. Amid the tumbling smog-banks, it might have been just another drifting shadow. That was well, for they had entered proscribed space, liable to interdiction from the Mechanicus guard-drones that patrolled the rim of their esoteric kingdom.
Crowl gazed out of the cockpit. Precipitous walls, weathered and rust-laced, rose up tight against the sweep of cracked raised transitways. Beyond the outer bastions were the first of the old manufactoria, crowned with lattices of scaffolding over the heavy segmented walls, broken up by the thrust of exhaust chimneys and great cooling towers. Long jets of brown steam hissed out of hidden grilles before dissipating into the thick brume like oil sinking to the sump.
They had not yet crossed the threshold. The Shade ghosted low, skirting the border, watching as the mountainous edifices steadily fell into greater states of disrepair. More than half of Skhallax seemed to be moribund, on the surface at least. Perhaps there were intact workings further down, deeper into the world’s core, where descending a hundred metres could mean going back in time by a thousand years. You never knew, not with the Priesthood of Mars.
‘Detecting no shadows,’ Revus reported, maintaining a metronomic speed and keeping them comfortably within the palls of shifting smoke.
‘You have the location,’ said Crowl. ‘Take us in when you’re sure.’
There was no movement visible on the walls. No crawlers burned their way between the rotting engine sheds, no phalanxes of infantry stalked the high parapets under the watchful eyes of robed tech-priests. It looked deserted.
‘Ants,’ said Revus.
‘What?’
‘Don’t kick the nest.’
Crowl grunted in agreement, and turned back to the view ahead. A landscape of heavy-boled pipelines ran ahead of them, punctuated by burner towers. Further into the gloom were the first landing stages they’d detected, raised on cross-braced scaffolds and overlooked by lumpen, slope-walled control towers. The complex looked as mournful and neglected as the rest.
‘Not too close,’ said Crowl, shunting a precision-mark from the Shade’s machine-spirit. ‘Take us down here.’
Revus dropped yet further, now virtually skimming the tops of the cracked rooflines below, before reaching the dropsite. Swinging the Shade’s engines over on their axes, he set the gunship down in a deep shaft between the forest of horizontally aligned pipelines. The largest of them was over ten metres in diameter, and snaked off into the distance, bound by enormous brace towers.