Mechanicum

Despite that, a newfound vigour filled Dalia, though whether this was in response to their brush with death or some other reason, she couldn't tell. All she knew was that she was alive and all the things she had feared losing were still there, just waiting to be experienced.

The same mood seemed to suffuse them all, and over the next few hours of their journey, as the ground levelled out and they made good time across the plain, each of her fellow companions relaxed into this new stage of their journey. Even Severine, whose arm was still painful despite Rho-mu 31's ministrations and the effects of a couple of painkillers, seemed in better spirits.

The air in the vehicle was clammy, yet it was better than the hot dust that billowed around them outside. This far from the pallidus the atmosphere outside wasn't actually poisonous, but it wasn't exactly pleasant. Dalia felt a growing sense of optimism that they were going to reach their goal after all as the hours blurred into days and the unending dust clouds enveloped them.

The days passed mostly in silence, though occasionally one of them would point out a particularly interesting formation or unusual sight and they would talk about it until it was obscured in the dust of their wake. Rho-mu 31 kept one eye on the distant forge, and Dalia felt a growing excitement as the ground became rockier.

At length, Rho-mu 31 slowed the Cargo-5 and pointed to a dark scar in the earth that dropped sharply into the ground between two descending cliffs of rock.

'The western entrance to the Noctis Labyrinthus,' said Rho-mu 31.

'Well, we made it here,' said Severine. 'What now?'

Dalia looked at the tense faces of her friends. They had come this far, but looking into the tomb-like darkness of the Noctis Labyrinthus, she could see their fear and hesitation at war with their desire to stand by her.

'We go in, what else is there to do?' asked Caxton. 'We've come all this way and we can't turn back. Right, Dalia?'

'Right,' said Dalia, grateful for his support.

'Fine by me,' said Zouche. 'Pointless journey if we don't go in.'

Severine nodded slowly, and Rho-mu 31 guided their vehicle down the sloping entrance to the canyon system.

The ground dropped away sharply, swallowing them whole as the light faded and left them travelling in a twilight wilderness of shadows and thin bars of diffuse light that filtered down from high above.

Sheer cliffs of layered rock soared above them, and Dalia felt like they were plunging deeper and deeper into the heart of the planet through some dreadful, unhealed wound.

Maven could barely contain his anger at the sight of so many bodies. The tunnel was choked with them, lying scattered in pieces or crushed amid the twisted wreckage of a mag-lev that had been blasted from the track. He rode Equitos Bellum through the darkness, his twin stab-lights illuminating the tunnel and the dusty armoured carapace of Pax Mortis.

'You still think we're following dead spoor?' he voxed to Cronus.

His battle-brother didn't answer for a moment and Maven sensed his friend's fury at what he was seeing. The mag-lev hadn't just been attacked, it had been obliterated. Weapons of tremendous power had torn it open from end to end and slaughtered every living soul within.

'With all that's happening across Mars and even after what we found in the pallidus, I'll admit I was beginning to regret my decision to follow you,' said Cronus. 'But no more, brother. Whatever that machine is, it has to be destroyed. This will not stand.'

Maven nodded in agreement, though, truth to tell, even he had begun to doubt the instincts of his mount as it led them deeper and deeper into the pallidus. Then, after days of fruitless searching, his auspex had fizzed and hissed with the familiar spider-like pattern of electromagnetic energy that was their prey's signature.

The buried wreck of a prospector's hauler had been almost completely obscured by the dust storms, but Equitos Bellum had scented the handiwork of its nemesis in its destruction.

No sooner had the Knight's auspex sniffed at the residue of reactor, shield and weapons, than Maven felt its gnawing desire to travel eastwards over the mountainous ridge between Tharsis and the Syria Planum in an aching pull of the Manifold.

Now they had found this corpse-filled tunnel, a charnel house of senseless slaughter, and still the Manifold pulled them onwards.

'Why hasn't anyone come to help?' wondered Maven. 'Why have they just left them?'

'Mars has bigger problems,' replied Cronus. 'You've heard the feeds. It's civil war.'

Maven heard the warring desires in his friend's voice and felt the same turmoil within his own heart. The inload feeds had been jammed with a million clamouring voices: declarations of war, pleas for aid and feral screams of hatred. The Martian forges, which had stood shoulder to shoulder through uncounted epochs of darkness and weathered those storms intact, were now doing to one another what Old Night could not.