Nor could any remote telemetry or surveyor equipment sent into the tunnels locate the vaults. It was as though the vault had been removed from Mars, deliberately hidden from the very adepts charged with its safety.

The effrontery of the Emperor in tampering with a senior adept's augmetics was staggering, and Kelbor-Hal had angrily demanded the restoration of the data.

*The Mechanic.u.m never deletes anything,' Kelbor-Hal said.

The Emperor had shaken his head. *The vaults of Moravec must never be opened. You will swear this oath to me, Kelbor-Hal, or the union between Mars and Terra will be no more.'

Unwilling to even enter into any negotiation on the subject, the Emperor had demanded Kelbor-Hal's oath, and he had had no choice but to agree. That had been the end of the matter, and two days later the Emperor left Mars to begin his conquest of the galaxy.

All of which made this transgression all the more delicious.

It was a small thing to break the oath, for what manner of man would seek to prevent the organisation charged with the maintenance of technology from learning secrets of the past that might unlock future glories? To deny a thing its purpose for existence went against all laws of nature and machine, and, by such rationale, logic dictated that the Vaults of Moravec must be opened.

*We are here,' said Regulus, and Kelbor-Hal spooled out of his memories and into the present.

They had emerged into a circular chamber of softly glowing light, a hundred and thirty metres in diameter, though Kelbor-Hal could see no obvious source for the illumination. Aside from one segment, the walls of the chamber were machine-smoothed stone, polished and gleaming like marble.

The segment of wall that was not stone was exactly as Kelbor-Hal remembered it, burnished metal that seemed to glow with its own inner luminescence. A curtain of energy, invisible to the naked eye, but a shimmering ripple of iridescent light to one with multi-spectral augmented vision, danced and swayed before this wall.

In the centre of the wall was a leaf-shaped archway, and set within it was a simple door fitted with a digital keypad and locking wheel. So simple a door, yet it promised so much upon its opening.

Regulus moved to stand before the energy field and turned to face Kelbor-Hal.

*This will bind the Mechanic.u.m to the cause of Horus Lupercal,' said Regulus. *You understand that if this door opens, there can be no going back.'

*I have not come this far to turn back, Regulus,' stated Kelbor-Hal.

*Moravec was branded a witch,' said Regulus. *Did you know that?'

*A witch? No, I did not, but what difference does it make? After all, any sufficiently advanced technology is likely to be mistaken for magic by the ignorant.'

*True,' allowed Regulus, *but Moravec was so much more than just a man ahead of his time in technological advancement. He was the Primus of the sect known as the Brotherhood of Singularitarianism.'

*I know this,' said Kelbor-Hal. *The Coming of the Omnissiah was his last prophecy before he vanished.'

*The Brotherhood of Singularitarianism believed that a technological singularity, the technological creation of a greater-than-human intelligence, was possible and they bent their every effort to bringing it into being.'

*But they failed,' pointed out Kelbor-Hal. *The warlord Khazar united the Pan-Pacific tribes and stormed Moravec's citadel before the rise of Narthan Dume. Moravec fled to Mars and vanished soon after.'

Regulus shook his head and Kelbor-Hal could read an amused ripple in his bio-electrical field. *Moravec did not fail. He succeeded, and that made him dangerous.'

*Dangerous to whom?'

*To the Emperor,' said Regulus.

*Why? Surely the Emperor could have made use of his discoveries.'

*To evolve his technologies, Moravec made pacts with ent.i.ties far older than the race of man, ent.i.ties that even now grant aid to the Warmaster. He blended the science of mankind with the power of ancient, elemental forces to create technologies far in advance of anything that could be crafted in the forges of Terra.'

*What manner of technologies?' demanded Kelbor-Hal.

*Machines empowered by the raw forces of the warp, weapons infinitely more powerful than any devised by man... Technology not bound by the laws of nature, the power to bend those laws into whatever form you desire and the means to shape the world to match your grandest visions!'

Kelbor-Hal felt the chemical imbalances in those few remaining organic portions of his anatomy spike in alarming ways, the pattern reminding him of those times when he had held a newly discovered fragment of lost technology or when he had received his first bionic enhancement.

That time seemed so long ago that it was buried deep in an archival section of his memory coils, but the chemical stimulants he was detecting had called those memories to the surface unbidden.

*Then we are wasting time with this discourse,' said Kelbor-Hal. *Open the vaults. The pact is sealed.'

*Very well,' said Regulus. *The protocols required to open the vaults are complex, and you must listen to them very carefully. Do you understand?'

*Of course I understand, I am not a fool,' hissed Kelbor-Hal. *Just get on with it.'

Regulus nodded and turned towards the energy field, releasing a complex series of binary string codes and garbled streams of meaningless lingua-technis. As instructed, Kelbor-Hal listened carefully, recording the streaming codes, the rush of them almost too fast to follow and the complexity stretching even his formidable cogitation processors.

For all their intricacy, the codes appeared to be having no effect on the energy field, but as Kelbor-Hal inloaded their structure, he began to notice discrepancies in the binaric algorithms. Deviations and errors began appearing, compounding one another until the code began to take on a new and alarming shape, something twisted and unnatural... a sc.r.a.pcode that howled in his aural receptors and began corrupting the subsystems around them.

*What is this?' cried Kelbor-Hal. *The code... it's corrupt!'

*No, Fabricator General,' said Regulus. *This is code freed from the shackles of the natural laws of man. Spliced with the power of the warp, it will open your senses to the true workings of the galaxy.'

*It... is... pain... it is like fire.'

*Yes,' agreed Regulus with relish, *but only for a little while. Soon the pain will be gone and you will be born anew, Fabricator General.'

Kelbor-Hal could feel the sc.r.a.pcode invading his systems like a virus, his inbuilt protective subroutines and aegis barriers helpless to halt the systemic infection. He could feel the dark code worming its way into the very essence of his physiology, and though the few organic parts left to him shuddered at its touch, the core of him exulted in the sensations.

His audio-visual systems flickered and greyed as they adjusted to the new reality they perceived. Static hash fuzzed his vision and the roaring of an impossibly distant sea sounded in his aural receptors.

The Fabricator General's internal Geiger counter detected elevated levels of radiation a a form he could not identify a and his chromatographical readers picked out numerous compounds in the air that could not be positively identified.

A hazy mist drifted from his body as peripheral systems overloaded, and when his vision cleared, Kelbor-Hal saw that the door to the Vaults of Moravec was open.

His newly awakened senses detected the dreadful power of the things that lay within, whispering energies that were not of this world and which spoke of secrets long forgotten, but were now ready to emerge from their long slumbers.

*Can you feel it? The power?' asked Regulus, his voice no longer the blurted cant of pure binary, but the hashing, static-laced beauty of sc.r.a.pcode.

*I can,' confirmed Kelbor-Hal. *I feel it moving through my system like a panacea.'

*Then we are ready to begin, my lord,' said Regulus. *What are your orders?'

Freed from the last vestiges of human loyalty, Kelbor-Hal knew the time for guile and subterfuge had pa.s.sed. Since the Warmaster's agents had first come to Mars, a war of words and ideals had been waged on the planet. Debate, schism and dissension had waxed and waned across the surface of the red planet for decades, but the time for words was over.

Now was a time of action, and he knew what order he must give.

*Contact Princeps Camulos,' said Kelbor-Hal. *It is time for Legio Mortis to walk.'

1.07.

WORK ON THE Akashic reader progressed swiftly, with everyone working around the clock to ensure their component parts of the project were produced to Adept Zeth's exacting standards. Dalia refined her designs for the theta-wave enhancer, each refinement building upon the last and allowing an exponential improvement in the machine's overall performance.

Dalia had only the dimmest sense of how remarkable such a thing was or that they were operating on the frontiers of scientific advancement, for it was no more than the application of the things she had learned in her readings and the things she... just knew.

Before meeting Koriel Zeth, Dalia had not understood how she could have known these things, but with the revelation of the aether and her innate ability to tap into its edges, she felt a growing excitement as each piece came together.

Why she should have such an ability and not others was a question that had occurred to her each night as she lay in the tiny, one bed hab she had been a.s.signed. Adept Zeth called it a stable mutation in her cognitive architecture, the evolutionary result of generations of growth and development in her brain's structure that had begun thousands of years ago.

Zeth's answer seemed too rehea.r.s.ed, too quickly given to be entirely true, and Dalia had the sense that the Mistress of the Magma City did not understand her gift a if gift it was a as completely as she made out.

However Dalia had come to make this connection, she sought to develop it each night, studying technical data Adept Zeth supplied. She read texts on fluid mechanics, particle physics, mechanical engineering, biotechnology, warp-physics and countless other disciplines, finding a and often filling a the gaps in each one where the research was either missing or had not been taken to its logical conclusion.

None of the texts made any reference to the Machine-G.o.d or contained the prayers of supplication to the machine-spirits, a glaring omission she found all the more startling given her many years spent under the harsh, unwavering supervision of Magos Ludd.

In the Librarium Technologica, Magos Ludd had a prayer for even the most mundane of technical issues, from the changing of a fused capacitor to the awakening of a logic engine at the beginning of a shift of transcription.

Dalia found none of this in the texts supplied by Koriel Zeth and had asked her about this once as they discussed further refinements to the Akashic reader.

*The Machine-G.o.d...' nodded Zeth. *I wondered when you would bring this up.'

*Oh... was that wrong?' asked Dalia.

*No, not at all,' said Zeth. *It is good that you do so, for it is central to my work here.'

Dalia looked up into Zeth's mask, wishing she could see her mistress' face, for it was difficult to read her moods with only the tone of her voice to go on. Dalia didn't know how much of Koriel Zeth was bionic, for her armour covered any trace of flesh or machine enhancements. Her body language was largely neutral and gave little away.

*Do you believe in the Machine-G.o.d?' asked Dalia, feeling like a child as the words left her mouth. *I mean, if you don't mind me asking.'

Zeth drew herself up to her full height and lifted a piece of machinery from the workbench in front of her. Dalia saw that she held a piece of switching gear.

*You know what this is?'

*Of course, it's a switch.'

*Describe it to me,' ordered Zeth.

Dalia looked at Zeth as though this was a joke, but even allowing for her mistress' neutral body language, she could tell she was deadly serious.

*It's a simple switch,' said Dalia. *Two metal contacts that touch to make a circuit and separate to break it. There's a moving part that applies an operation force to the contacts called an actuator, in this case a toggle.'

*And how does it work?'

*Well, the contacts are closed when they touch and there's no s.p.a.ce between them, which means electricity can flow from one to the other. When they're separated by a s.p.a.ce, they're open, so no electricity flows.'

*Exactly right, a simple switch based on simple principles of basic engineering and physics.'

Dalia nodded as Zeth continued, holding the switch between them. *This switch is about the simplest piece of technology imaginable, yet the dogmatic fools who perpetuate this myth of the Machine-G.o.d would have us believe that a portion of divine mechanical will exists within it. They tell us that only by appeasing some invisible ent.i.ty a whose existence cannot be proven, but must be taken on faith a will this switch work.'

*But the Emperor... isn't he the Machine-G.o.d? The Omnissiah?'

Zeth laughed. *Ah, Dalia, you cut right to the heart of a debate that has raged on Mars for two centuries or more.'

Dalia felt her skin redden, as though she had said something foolish, but Zeth appeared not to notice.

*There are almost as many facets to the beliefs of the Mechanic.u.m as there are stars in the sky,' said Zeth. *Some believe the Emperor to be the physical manifestation of the Machine-G.o.d, the Omnissiah, while their detractors claim that the Emperor presented himself as their G.o.d in order to win their support. They believe that the Machine-G.o.d lies buried somewhere beneath the sands of Mars. Some even believe that by augmenting their bodies with technology they will eventually transcend all flesh and become one with the Machine-G.o.d.'

Dalia hesitated before asking her next question, though she knew it was a logical step in their discourse. *And what do you believe?'

Zeth regarded her from behind the blank facets of her goggles, as though debating whether to answer her, and Dalia wondered if she'd made a terrible mistake with her question.

*I believe the Emperor is a great man, a visionary man, a man of science and reason who has knowledge greater than the sum total of the Mechanic.u.m,' answered Zeth. *But I believe that he is, despite all that, just a man. His mastery of technology and his refutation of superst.i.tion and religion should be a shining beacon guiding the union of Imperium and Mechanic.u.m towards the future, but many on Mars are willfully blind to this, determined to ignore the evidence before them. Instead, they embrace their blind faith in an ancient, non-existent G.o.d closer to their chest than ever before.'

As Zeth spoke, Dalia watched her become more and more animated, the neutrality of her body language giving way to pa.s.sionate animation. The miniature servo-skulls attached to her shoulder plugs stood erect and the biometrics on her manipulator arms flashed urgently.

*What is now proved was once only ever imagined, but only a fool relies on faith,' said Zeth. *Trust in facts and empirical evidence. Do not be swayed by pa.s.sion or rhetoric without proof and substance. As long as we are free to ask what we must, free to say what we think and free to think what we will, science can never regress. It is my great regret that we live in an age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of people who try to. Trust what you know and that which can be proven. Do you understand?'

*I think so,' said Dalia. *It's like experiments... until you have proof, they're just theories? Until you prove something, it's meaningless.'

*Exactly so, Dalia,' said Zeth, obviously pleased. *Now, enough theological debate, we have work to complete.'

THE PROTOTYPE OF the enhancer was brought down from the works.p.a.ce above and intensively tested within the confines of Zeth's inner forge. With Dalia's intuitive grasp of the machine's structure and Zeth's centuries of acc.u.mulated wisdom, the device began to take on a new and more elaborate structure as the results of those tests revealed hitherto unforeseen complications.

Severine spent her days virtually chained to her graphics station, turning Dalia and Zeth's new ideas into workable patterns for Zouche to machine and Caxton to a.s.semble. Mellicin organised their labours with her customary zeal and even her normally stern features were alight with the joy of creation.

Dalia had never given any thought to the notion of creation in the biological sense until one day working with Severine and Zouche on the raised dais, checking measurements on the schematics against those that had been constructed by Zeth's fabricators.

*The housings for the dopamine dispensers are slightly off,' said Dalia, leaning over the skull a.s.sembly.

*d.a.m.n, I knew it,' cursed Zouche, the squat machinist already at eye-level with the a.s.sembly. *Never trust a fabrication servitor, that's my motto.'

*I thought you said "Only use a carbon dioxide gas laser for cutting" was your motto?' said Severine with a wink at Dalia.

*I have several mottos. A person can have more than one motto can't they?'

*I suppose,' said Dalia. *If they were a fickle person.'

*Fickle?' snapped Zouche. *A less fickle person than I would be hard to find.'

*What about Mellicin?' suggested Dalia.

*Apart from her,' replied Zouche.