He saw Lachine about to speak and said, 'Not literally, of course. I look at the sheer volume of armour stored here and, even though none of these suits are occupied by one of the Emperor's finest, I am still awed by the power of the Astartes and take solace that we are protected by such awesome heroes.'

'Conclusion: your words lead me to infer that on this day you do not take the same satisfaction you would normally.'

'Indeed I do not, Lachine. Despite my attempts to immerse myself in the daily tasks of the forge, I find my thoughts returning to the chaos that has engulfed our beloved world over the last few weeks.'

Beginning on the day the freakish and unnatural storms had broken over the faraway peak of Olympus Mons and the devastating machine plague had wreaked havoc across Mars, an epidemic of riots, suicides and murders had swept through Mondus Occulum, claiming thousands of lives and, more importantly, doing untold damage to the production facilities.

Scores of factories and weapon shops had been destroyed, burned to the ground or smashed beyond repair in the whipping, shuddering waves of panic and psychosis that had swept through the habs and factories like contagious lunacy.

The forge marshals had been unable to cope with the paroxysms of violence and, though it pained him to do so, Kane had ordered them to withdraw and allow the rioters to run their course.

'Who would have thought such trouble could have been touched off by a freak weather system over three thousand kilometres away?' he said.

'Studies by Magos Cantore have shown that uncomfortably cold weather can stimulate aggressiveness and a willingness to take risks, while apathy prevails in the heat,' said Lachine. 'Additional: temperature has previously been shown to affect mood, which in turn affects behaviour, with higher temperature or barometric pressure related to higher mood, better memory, and broadened cognitive style. Humidity, temperature and hours of exposure to sunshine have the greatest effect on mood, though Cantore believes humidity to be the most significant predictor in regression and canonical correlation analysis. Implications for the climate control of forges and subsequent worker performance are discussed in detail in the study's conclusion. Would you like me to summarise them?'

'In the name of the Omnissiah, please don't,' said Kane, striding onwards into the depths of the armorium. Lachine and his retinue struggled to match his long, purposeful stride.

As the panting Lachine drew alongside him, Kane said, 'Certainly, its absurd to believe that a meteorological phenomenon, even one so fierce, could affect the psyches of so many, yet the evidence before us is hard to ignore. However, the damage was not restricted just to the cognitive processes of the forge's population.'

That fact troubled him more than any other.

As the storm raged over Olympus Mons, the vox-lines and data highways of Mars had swarmed with screaming, shrieking packets of corrupted data that sliced into the delicate systems that governed almost every aspect of the workings of Mondus Occulum.

The outlying forge cogitators and logic engines had clogged with corrupt data, howling ghosts of sourceless machine-noise and dangerous code packets of infected algorithms that many of the most advanced aegis protocols were helpless to defeat.

Only Kane's swift action to shut down the I/O highways and the fact that the vast majority of his systems had recently been upgraded to take advantage of Koriel Zeth's revolutionary system of noospheric data transference had spared them the worst of the attack, for an attack it surely had been.

'How much longer do the code-scrubbers need before they will have my system cleaned out?' he asked.

'Current estimates range from six full rotations to thirty.'

'That's a wide range. Can't they narrow their estimation?'

'Apparently the corrupt code is proving to be most resilient to their efforts,' explained Lachine. 'Each portion of circuitry that is certified purged soon develops faulty lines of code at a geometric rate once again. They dare not reconnect any system touched by the polluted algorithms for fear of re-infection.'

'Have they identified its point of origin?'

'Not with any certainty, though the infection of systems appears to be spreading outwards from the forge of the Fabricator General, suggesting that it was the first to suffer.'

'Or where it was released,' muttered Kane. Despite repeated attempts to communicate with Kelbor-Hal, every transmission had been rebuffed by squalling code screams like barking dogs or was simply ignored.

'Query: you believe this scrapcode to have been released into the Martian systems on purpose?' Even the normally logical and literal Lachine could not keep an emotional response from his voice at the notion that the scrapcode had been unleashed deliberately.

Kane cursed himself for his verbal slip and shrugged.

'It's a possibility,' he admitted, keeping his tone light. He didn't particularly want to voice his suspicions to Lachine. His apprenta was loyal, but he was naive, and Kane knew that information could be thieved by any number of means from supposedly secure sources.

No, the less Lachine knew of Kane's suspicions the better.

According to the code-scrubbers, the scrapcode had attempted to shut down the vox network and defence protocols that protected his forge and then release the tension in the Tsiolkovsky towers' guy wires. Kane had shut off the links between Mondus Occulum and the rest of Mars in an instant, leaving them floundering in the dark, but safe from further attack.

Even communications off-world had become next to impossible thanks to a sourceless backwash of psychic interference. Kane had only been able to maintain contact between the forge of Ipluvien Maximal and the Magma City of Adept Zeth thanks to the noosphere.

The news coming from both was neither reassuring nor particularly illuminating.

Both adepts had suffered similar outbreaks of inexplicable violence and madness among their populace, though only Maximal had experienced serious machine failures, losing three of his prized reactors to critical mass overloads. Zeth had spoken of a failed experiment that had seen virtually all of her psykers dead, no doubt related to the psychic interference surrounding Mars.

As if things weren't bad enough, Maximal went on to tell of fragmentary communications he had inloaded from the expedition fleets that spoke of an equally terrible catastrophe in the Istvaan system.

Details were sketchy and Maximal had not wanted to speculate without firmer information, but it appeared that a dreadful incident had occurred around the third planet, which was now said to be a blasted, ashen wasteland.

Kane knew of only one weapon that could reduce a planet to such a wretched, hellish state in so short a time.

Had the Warmaster unleashed the Life Eater or was this the desperate last act of a defeated foe? Maximal's sources had no answer to that, but claimed that the Astartes had taken fearful casualties.

Whether they had suffered as a result of enemy action or a terrible accident of friendly fire was unclear, but for Astartes to suffer any loss on such a scale was almost impossible to imagine.

Of all of them, Maximal's vox-systems had suffered least in the deluge of unclean code, and he was even now attempting to restore communications with agencies beyond the surface of Mars for further information.

Via secure noospheric links, all three adepts expressed their certainty that the infection of the Martian systems bore all the hallmarks of a pre-emptive strike, but without more solid data, there was nothing they could do but strengthen their defences in case of further assault.

Kane had heard the fear in Maximal's ridiculously rarefied voice and despised him for it. Maximal was not an easy adept to like and Kane considered him to be little more than an archivist rather than an innovator. Koriel Zeth, on the other hand, had spoken boldly of resisting any follow-up attacks and of how she had despatched envoys to allied warrior orders of Titans and Knights to secure their assistance.