He scrambled for his rebreather hood, but couldn't find it, feeling airborne poisons eating away the blood vessels of his lungs with every breath. He rolled onto his side, coughing up thick wads of phlegmy mucus as he felt a heavy rumbling through the ground.

The machine was moving and more of the sand fell away. Quinux saw its body was mounted on a heavy-gauge track unit that threshed sand before it gained traction and rumbled forward.

Quinux scrabbled pitifully at the ashen ground as it rolled towards him.

'Please! No!' he screamed, the words gurgling as blood poured from his mouth.

Its sensor blisters glittering with cold mechanical purpose, the Kaban Machine ignored his pleas and ground Quinux into the Martian soil beneath its bulk.

Beneath the towering peak of Olympus Mons, the Fabricator General watched as a parade of augmented Praetorian battle servitors marched from the labyrinth of Moravec. They moved by a variety of means of locomotion - some on tracks, some on clicking mechanical legs, others on thick, rubberised wheels, while some retained the use of their human legs.

They filled the great engine hangars beneath the mountain, thousands of newly enhanced warriors ready to fight for Horus Lupercal. The power revealed within the Vaults of Moravec was like nothing Kelbor-Hal had ever known, the joyous tumult of it filling his flood-stream with vigour and insight beyond that of beings composed merely of flesh.

Kelbor-Hal felt a surge of raw, unfettered aggressive power through his crackling energy fields as he watched the assembling army. This was a time of great moment, though only he and Regulus were here to witness it.

That would soon change when the dreadful war engines of the Mechanicum were unleashed, these weapons of the Dark Mechanicum.

The weaponised servitors were huge, muscular and sheathed in layered armour that was blackened like scorched flesh, their spines hunched over and threaded with barbed spikes. Those without mouths burbled scrapcode from integral augmitters, a glorious hymnal to the newest power on Mars. Others, with etched bronze frightmasks, spilled nonsense from bloodied lips that twisted and leered with brutal anticipation.

Beside Kelbor-Hal, Regulus watched the procession with glee, his electrical field warping and twisting with pleasure as each of the newly transformed servitor warriors emerged and took position within the great hangar.

'These are magnificent, Fabricator General,' said Regulus in admiration. 'The power of the warp and the power of the Mechanicum alloyed together in glorious fusion.'

Kelbor-Hal accepted the compliment, knowing that Lukas Chrom had done the bulk of the work, but unwilling to admit the fact. He had simply combined Chrom's advances in artificial sentience with the power contained within the Vaults of Moravec to produce something wondrous.

'These servitors are just the beginning,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'We begin work on the Skitarii next. The scrapcode has worked its way through the entire floodstream network of Olympus Mons, and is already spreading beyond Tharsis.'

Virtually every port and connective point on Mars was linked somewhere, and the glorious code of the warp was scurrying along every conduit, wire, fibre-optic, wireless feed and haptic implant. Soon it would reach every forge and adept, and those touched by its transformative power would be born anew.

'I can feel forges as far away as Sinus Sabaeus already scratching with elements of transformed code,' confirmed Regulus. 'Soon the aegis protocols of the other forges will be broken down to allow the scrapcode into their inner workings.'

'Then they will be ours,' hissed Kelbor-Hal.

'There will be resistance,' replied Regulus. 'Not all the forges are as vulnerable to the scrapcode. The Magma City's links have proved to be resistant, as are those of Ipluvien Maximal and Fabricator Locum Kane.'

Kelbor-Hal nodded. 'That is only to be expected. Adept Zeth is pioneering a newly developed form of noospheric data transfer. Her forge and those of her allies have been modified to utilise it over more traditional forms of communication.'

'Noospheric? I am not familiar with the term.'

'No matter,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'It will be ours soon enough. I have dispatched Ambassador Melgator to the Magma City to sequester her data and determine her loyalties.'

'I already know her loyalties, Fabricator General. She is an enemy of the Warmaster.'

Given what had happened after the opening of the Vaults of Moravec, it was hard to fault Regulus's logic.

When the skies above Olympus Mons had raged and buckled at the bloody dawn of this new power, freakishly induced weather patterns carried the echoes of its shrill afterbirth from the Great Mountain to every corner of Mars.

Every corner but one.

As the seething Martian skies darkened, a searing surge of psychic energy above Koriel Zeth's Magma City had pierced the heavens and almost drowned the birth-shout of the emergent power with its light and violence.

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.