‘It’s already exloading?’

  ‘My dear Hydraq, you didn’t pay me to craft slow code, now did you?’

  ‘Damn it, Simocatta,’ snapped Hydraq. ‘Start with that!’

  Simocatta laughed as Hydraq ran to his own chamber. Aurora was waiting for him. She’d already known what Simocatta was going to say.

  ‘Your heart rate’s high,’ she said, as if she could see it.

  For all Hydraq knew, perhaps she could.

  He nodded and took a moment to compose himself, controlling his breathing and forcing his heart-rate lower. He eased himself into the Aquila’s grav-couch. It moulded to his body like a second skin, and he let himself sink into its embrace.

  He felt his body relax. Now that the hunt was on, all the tension jangling along his nerves vanished. This was what he was born to do and his confidence calmed him.

  ‘Better,’ said Aurora, unsnapping two lengths of copper cabling from his cogitator terminal. ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But if we pull this off…’

  Aurora shrugged. ‘Can we trust Enaric?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he answered. ‘That’s why I have you.’

  ‘So you do.’

  Closing his eyes, he said, ‘I am what I bring in,’ and took the cables from Aurora’s porcelain-smooth fingertips. He slotted the jacks home in the sockets drilled just behind both ears. ‘Only that and nothing more.’

  ‘You say that every time,’ said Aurora.

  ‘You say that every time,’ he said, running his hand over the surface of his cogitator. ‘It helps me deal with the Red Static. Listen, don’t underestimate the importance of ritual.’

  ‘I’m on Mars, how could I forget?’ she said as his hand slid into the palm-shaped depression of the cogitator’s upper surface. The activator rune was warm beneath his skin.

  He let out a breath, feeling the thrumming power of the machine beneath his hand. The potential it represented.

  ‘Good hunting,’ said Aurora, bending to kiss his forehead.

  ‘That helps too.’

  ‘Then this will go smoothly?’

  ‘Smooth as glass,’ he promised, and pressed the activator rune.

  Falling down a light-filled tunnel. Rushing motion, sickening vertigo. The sense of being drawn out to a chain a molecule thick. Connection was always difficult, but this…

  This felt like it was stretching him past breaking point.

  Then, like taut elastic, he snapped back.

  Vertigo again. Motion blur, quickly followed by nausea.

  He fought it, knowing it wasn’t real.

  Inner ear balance that wasn’t his. A centre of gravity altered. Someone else’s body.

  New sensations. All unpleasant.

  Adjust, damn it. Get a grip.

  The nausea diminished, the sense of dislocation passed.

  Light and three-dimensional space unfolded. Dimensions had meaning again. The vectors of X, Y and Z restored.

  He sat before an angled panel of riveted steel, inset with a convex data-slate displaying lines of hexamathic cascades. And there, slotted through the inload port, was the data-spike Simocatta had contrived to have Duqu find. The crossed telescope device of Archmagos Alhazen was clear on the spike’s base.

  Decades had passed since Hydraq had processed advanced multi-dimensional geometry, and most of the data-slate’s contents before him – no, not him, Adept Duqu – was beyond his understanding. In the corner of the slate was a blinking smirr of static, an entirely unremarkable visual glitch, common to all data-slates.

  Except this was no glitch, this was Simocatta’s covertly-running infiltration data, bypassing the forge’s security protocols entirely and opening the door to Adept Duqu’s augmetics.

  Twenty-four fingers tapped a clicking dance over brass-rimmed keys of opal. With every key-strike, their cuckoo in the nest took in more of the polymorphic code. Duqu’s single overhanging mechadendrite snapped a carriage return back each time the panel’s scrivener-quill filled a page.

  Adept Duqu’s full attention was focused on his work. The man was completely unaware the sensory inputs of his augmetics had been hijacked. Oblivious to the fact, he was becoming less and less himself with every passing moment. Only when a fractional misalignment in Simocatta’s canticles caused a visual glitch in the ocular interface did he pause in his labours long enough to look up.

  Through Duqu’s eyes, Hydraq saw he was seated on the overseer’s pew of a Parity Scriptorium. Five thousand adepts sat in ordered ranks before him like supplicants. Faceless drones whose work Duqu – along with dozens of other stern-faced adepts – was monitoring for integer discrepancies. Chain-hung fluorescent lumens made what little skin was visible shimmer with a sickly, bleached-out sheen.

  The vaulted chamber stretched into the distance, the roof coffered in palladium and hung with alloyed banners depicting the ongoing conquest of knowledge over ignorance. In the spaces between cogged pilasters and surveillant picters, devotional frescoes, hundreds of metres long, panelled each wall.

  The hazed blur vanished from the corner of the data-slate. The polymorphic was done. Time to get moving.

  Time to taste the Red Static.

  Hydraq unleashed a surge of myriad hostile tech he’d encountered over the decades: scrapcode fragments, dissembler code he and Pavelka had worked on; line-breakers and hijackers all. Enough to overwhelm a moderately protected system, and Simocatta’s shape-shifting canticles had rendered Adept Duqu defenceless.

  The link between the adept and Hydraq roared with jagged lines of blood-red static. The adept’s enhanced nervous system went into agonising spasms as Hydraq barraged him with false code, hexamathic dead ends and geometrically-increasing information requests.

  Howling, snapping and stabbing spikes of aggressive code filled obscured Duqu’s vision, but the link went both ways. Hydraq’s body would feel this too, with only the grav-couch and Aurora to keep his spine from breaking in repercussive convulsions. He couldn’t feel it yet, his sensory apparatus intimately linked with Duqu, but he would.

  He’d experience it with interest when his senses returned to his own flesh. The thought of that sent a squirming knot of panic deep into his gut.

  Duqu tried to call for help, but the Red Static had already shut him down to all external communications. To all intents and purposes, Duqu might as well have been alone on one of the black gaols orbiting Titan.

  Then it was over.

  The Red Static fell away and the frescoed chamber swam into focus. Duqu’s hands sat unmoving on the metalled keyboard. The organic portions of his anatomy were spiking across the board, but Hydraq sent calming blurts of binary and balms into the adept’s floodstream.

  Adept Hydraq?+

  The voice in his skull was Simocatta’s.

  Don’t call me that,+ said Hydraq. +But, yes, it’s me.+

  Excellent news. You have full control?+

  He lifted his hands. Not Duqu’s, his. They moved by his volition, and he ran through a series of basic motor/cognitive exercises to assess the level of his systemic integration.

  I do,+ he said.

  Hydraq owned Duqu, body and soul. His consciousness occupied the throne in the adept’s neurocortex, and there was nothing the screaming adept could do about it.

  Sending you the prefix codes now,+ said Simocatta, all levity and pomposity gone now that they were on mission. Perhaps he had underestimated the man. Too bad they’d never work together again.

  Got them,+ said Hydraq as reams of information appeared in his memory, data he had no recollection of acquiring. It was simply knowledge he possessed and felt like he always had.

  Enter the commands swiftly, Hydraq,+ said Simocatta. +The authority signifiers will not linger in your short-term memory.+

  I won’t need them long,+ Hydraq assured him.

  He flexed his fingers, quickly adjusting to the extra digits on each hand, and inserted a series of root commands into Forge Basiri’s infrastructure. All were far above Duqu’s rank, but each was prefixed by authority signifiers provided by Magos Enaric. With that finished, he requisitioned a flyer on a southern platform and filed a flight plan he never intended to follow.

  Done,+ said Hydraq as each command was accepted. He shut down the slate and inloaded acausal locks that would take days to break.

  Based on distance and the mean striding velocity of Adept Duqu, it should take you no more than fifty minutes to reach the central data core,+ said Simocatta.

  I’d best get moving then,+ said Hydraq.

  Is it my turn now?+ asked Simocatta, and Hydraq grinned as he heard the man’s mischief over the sensory link.

  Yes, it’s your turn,’ said Hydraq. ‘Run the Night Dragon.+

  Simocatta cut his link to Hydraq. The plans he had sourced would be enough to guide the man through Basiri.

  And he had mayhem of his own to unleash.

  Decades spent strengthening dataspheres to resist attack from hostile scrapcode had given Simocatta preternatural insight into the best way to exploit a forge’s vulnerability.

  Not even the best networks could avoid mutational errors in their system architecture or cracks in their protection. Even the deep security of Olympus Mons could be broken open by the right operators using the right code.

  As Simocatta knew to his cost.

  Dark Mechanicus adepts had cracked a Primus-level datacore under his aegis. They had stolen standard template construct schematics for armour-penetrating warheads that were now wreaking havoc in warzones surrounding the Eye of Terror.

  From being courted by the highest adepts of Mars, Simocatta’s star had fallen and fallen hard. Now his genius turned to breaking open the very places he had once protected, forced to whore his genius to scabby little men like Hydraq.

  Still, at least it paid well.

  And wealthy men could expunge anything from their history.

  The infocytes had completed their sourceless connection to the planetary network, and Simocatta let his consciousness descend into the golden ocean of knowledge and data circling the Red Planet.

  He let out a soft sigh, feeling the vastness of the Martian datasphere, an infinite vista of knowledge rendered as light. It humbled him and awed him. It filled him with wonder that his species had learned so much, then touched him with sadness to know how much had been lost.

  The surface of Mars was like a newborn star raging with thermal currents, plasma storms and coronal ejections. Binaric brilliance shone in radiant hurricanes around the mountainous datastacks and greatest of these were the forge temples. Each was the fiefdom of a great magos of Mars, with molten streams of datalight pouring from them.

  Simocatta was far more interested in what was going into the forges. Most had their own geothermal power cores, but that alone could not hope to supply the energy demands of a fully functioning forge-temple.

  The bulk of their energy was drawn from the titanic atomic cores spread throughout the quadrangle, each burning with the light of sullen stars. Volatile cores imprisoned and enslaved by the works of man, each was held in a delicate balance between explosive detonation and dormancy.

  Simocatta split his consciousness into proxy avatars and despatched them into the data flow surrounding each reactor. Sensing unauthorised presences, Ouroboros Protocols rose to intercept them, monstrous coils of idiot data whose only purpose was to burn out an attacker’s neocortex.

  He knew full well how exquisitely lethal these protocols were; he’d conceptualised their core systems. They circled his avatars like glossy black snakes, unthinkingly hostile and ferociously hungry.

  Come then, my beauties,+ said Simocatta. +Feast. Devour.+

  They flew at his avatars and tore them to shreds in a frenzy of hyper-violent deletions. Simocatta had designed the Ouroboros Protocols as a slash and burn form of defence. Unsubtle and indiscriminate, but thorough.

  Except in this case, that very thoroughness was their undoing. Each of Simocatta’s avatars was nothing more than a shell, a delivery system for something far worse.

  The Night Dragon: weaponised data crafted by an ancient renegade known simply as Malevolus that had no purpose except to destroy. The binaric equivalent of the most diabolical venom imaginable. And the control mechanisms for a dozen atomic reactors all across Sinus Sabeus had just ingested it.

  Sudden panic flared brightly within each reactor complex as the Night Dragon went to work. It burned out control systems and wreaked havoc within the regulatory mechanisms of rapidly overheating cores.

  Simocatta had spent decades attempting to develop a defence against the Night Dragon, but had never succeeded.

  He doubted anyone else had either.

  Hydraq’s progress through Forge Basiri was swift.

  He’d left the Parity Scriptorium without comment, though numerous eyes had followed his unscheduled departure. Embedded memories of the forge’s layout guided him through its brightly-lit pathways.

  His sole deviation was to enter a Machina Opus temple, where he retrieved a pair of moulded plastek melta-pistols that Aurora had hidden beneath a reinforced ironwork pew. The basalt structure was deserted but for a handful of dark-armoured Techmarines of the Sable Swords. The gigantic transhumans looked up as he entered, but instantly dismissed him as was typical of their breed.

  Thus armed, Hydraq continued onwards.

  Archmagos Alhazen ran an efficient forge-temple. The mag-lev transits ran to a precise timetable and the ingress/egress patterns of adepts, servitors and the thousands of robed tech-priests were regulated to exacting standards.

  Hydraq was the only one not following its prescribed flow.

  His unauthorised movement had been registered, as had his unsanctioned entrance to the datacore complex. Three squads of Mechanicus Protectors were already mobilising to intercept.

  All things being equal, Hydraq had four minutes until they reached him.

  But all things were not equal.

  Hydraq had just penetrated the deepest level of the datacore complex when Forge Basiri went dark.

  Power failures on Mars were uncommon, but even so, each forge possessed numerous backup systems to immediately take over if the power was ever lost.

  In theory, a complete loss of power was impossible.

  Unless someone with senior enough prefix-codes had disabled those backup systems.

  Hydraq could picture the chaos above, tens of thousands of adepts, info-sentinels and calculus-logi scrambling to save the precious data in their systems before internal capacitors drained completely.

  Every soul in service to Archmagos Alhazen, including the Mechanicus Protectors, would be bound by emergency protocols. A single adept was the least of their worries.

  How wrong they were.

  Hydraq followed a curving corridor in total darkness towards the entrance to the most secure vault in Forge Basiri. Had the power been operational, a dozen security systems would already have halted his progress, shot him down or otherwise ended his infiltration.

  The corridor made an abrupt turn, and Hydraq found himself in a high-roofed chamber of incredible dimensions. At its exact centre was an obsidian cube fifteen metres square and enclosed within a latticed steel framework.

  Squatting before the caged cube were two Praetorian-grade servitors. Bloated with combat augmetics, lethal weaponry and advanced battle-wetware, they were monsters in all but name.

  Praetorians were capable of semi-autonomous engagement, but the blackout had isolated them from the combat grid. To their eyes, Hydraq was a native of Forge Basiri. He didn’t give them a chance to realise their mistake and vaporised both their skulls with twin shots from the melta pistols.

  The weaponised servitors collapsed in hulking piles of liquified metal and bubbling flesh. Hydraq moved past their corpses to the cube over which they had stood guard.

  ‘A data-tight Faraday Cage,’ he said in admiration.

  The way in was a simple door of plated steel secured with a heavy padlock. Protection so absurdly primitive that it seemed ridiculous, but it was all that separated Hydraq from Archmagos Alhazen’s most precious secret.

  That very primitivity was what had required a physical intervention. Data connected to a network was inherently vulnerable to remote attack, but this datacore was completely isolated. And on a planet where every single system shared a link somewhere, only data kept completely off the Martian networks could be considered secure.

  Hydraq’s presence here refuted that belief.

  He blasted the lock from the door and kicked it inwards.

  Inside, the cube was empty save for a single, gloss-black cogitator that drew its power from battery racks secured in recessed alcoves.

  Mono-tasked servitors tended to the batteries, and they ignored him as he circled the cogitator. Three metres tall, smooth-faced and featureless. A black monolith to knowledge, like something erected by a race of celestial engineers.

  At its midpoint was a single inload/exload port and Hydraq unfurled Adept Duqu’s mechadendrite, rotating its end cap to a data-spike. Duqu’s slack features were reflected in the mirror surface of the cogitator and Hydraq shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, my friend, this is the end for you. I need your memory space.’

  He felt Duqu’s panic, but didn’t let that stop him erasing every aspect of the hijacked adept’s persona from his own memory coils. In a single act of murderous reformatting, Hydraq reduced Adept Duqu’s body to a mindless meat puppet.

  No loose ends.

  He slotted home the data-spike and allowed a small smile to surface as the exload began. Binary scrolled past his eyes in dense, interleaved streams.

  ‘You keep a great many secrets, archmagos,’ said Hydraq, checking the aircraft he’d authorised earlier was prepped on its launch platform. It was, and he grinned, browsing the data as it poured from the cogitator. Even freed from the necessity of storing Adept Duqu’s personality matrices, the memory coils were quickly approaching capacity.

 

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