Mechanicum

A moment's stunned silence followed Rho-mu 31's words, and then the tension in the compartment was suddenly, explosively, relieved by hysterical laughter.

'That wasn't funny,' said Caxton, between laughing and wiping tears from his eyes.

'No,' agreed Severine. 'You shouldn't say things like that.'

'What? Can't I make a joke?' asked Rho-mu 31.

'I think they're just surprised you made one at all,' put in Dalia, looking back into the compartment. 'I don't think they're used to the Mechanicum trying to be funny.'

Rho-mu 31 nodded and said, 'I may be Mechanicum, but I am still human.'

With that, the strange unease that had settled on them at the sight of the deserted townships was dispelled, and they began chatting as animatedly as when they had built the first version of the Akashic reader.

The excitement of the journey into the unknown was rekindled and as the mag-lev made its way uphill, Zouche extended a discreet dendrite and plugged into the compartment's data port, projecting the view from the hull-mounted picter onto the glass of the window.

They eagerly watched the feed as Zouche panned the image around. They saw the desolate plains stretching away to the south and the black smudge on the horizon above the Magma City nearly two thousand kilometres away. At Caxton's request, Zouche returned the view to front-on and the image shimmered as it displayed the silver mag-line carrying them up into the mountains.

Dalia let out a tiny gasp of fear as she saw the mag-line vanish into a gaping, steel-lined cavern mouth that pierced the flanks of the cliffs and led through the rock towards Mondus Gamma.

She took Caxton's hand and gripped it tightly as the tunnel drew nearer, the yawning blackness of it suddenly terrifying.

'What's the matter?' he asked.

'I didn't realise we'd need to go through the darkness,' she said.

'It's just a tunnel,' said Caxton. 'There's nothing to worry about.'

The forces of the Fabricator General came for Adept Zeth several hours before Dalia's mag-lev approached the tunnel connecting the Tharsis uplands with the Syria Planum. A Mechanicum heavy flyer cruised in from the north-west and set down on the statue-lined Typhon Causeway before the Magma City, scorching a score of the marble worthies black with the heat of its enormous jets. The underside of the craft shone with golden light from the bubbling, steaming lava to either side of the wide causeway.

The ungainly aircraft was unarmed, but as it settled on its landing skids, a continuous loop of code streamed from its augmitters on a repeating cycle, demanding that Adept Koriel Zeth present herself by the order of the Fabricator General.

The summons was broadcast in the highest and most authoritative code tense, and as such could not be ignored. The flanks of the flyer gusted steam and folded outwards, providing debarkation ramps for the warriors carried within.

Three hundred modified Skitarii and Protectors marched from the flyer's hold onto the basalt causeway. Wretched by-blows of the Fabricator General's union with the power unlocked in the depths of the forgotten vaults beneath Olympus Mons, these were twisted perversions of their original martial glory. Hunched carapaces, spiked armour and horned helmets clad them and their limb weapons seethed with unnatural power.

The Protectors were no less modified, their bodies swollen and grotesque, their weapons blackened and reforged in new and hateful shapes, designed for pain as much as killing.

Under the watchful gaze of armoured turrets and missile emplacements cunningly worked into the walls of ceramite and adamantium of Zeth's forge, these abominable killers formed up in three separate cohorts and marched on the Vulkan Gate.

Behind them came a shield-palanquin borne by towering, brutish Skitarii with grey skin and barbed armour. These monstrous, ogre-like warriors had been raised to such stature by more than simple gene-bulking and augmetics. Their bodies glistened and their veins pulsed with ruddy light, as though with an internal electricity.

Ambassador Melgator and Adept Regulus stood proudly atop the palanquin, clad in robes of midnight black with their hoods drawn up over their skulls. Melgator carried a staff of ebony topped with a snarling wolf s head and Regulus a staff of ivory topped with a skull of black obsidian.

The host of horrifically altered warriors parted to let them through, and Regulus halted the palanquin a hundred metres before the gate. The soaring adamantine glory of the Magma City's great portal was worked with silver cogs, golden eagles and lightning bolts, and it was opening.

As a widening bar of light split the two halves of the gate and the skitarii bristled with belligerent scrapcode, Regulus raised his arms and a streaming hash of lingua-technis, irregular and arrhythmic, blurted from his internal augmitters. His skull-topped staff crackled with corposant in time with his utterances and, one by one, the turrets and weapons platforms on the wall shut down.