Mechanicum

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 space appeared to be dimensionless. She had no sensation of up or down and no sense of the passage 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 sex 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 encompass 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 passed around Mars in a multitude 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 scrapcode 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 assassin 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 scrapcode found each forge's weakest point and induced disastrous system failures at every turn.

At Sinus Sabaeus, the continent-sized assembly 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.