The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  Though the tech-priests were close to motionless, they were still active. Data flashed through the noosphere: readings of albedo, recitations of mass and orbit, psalms marking the planet’s traversal of the constellations. No words were spoken, there was no communication outside the realm of the mathematical, but even data could weep.

  Ambassador Vethorel joined in the ritual every night. She watched the arc of the Red Planet, and felt the same agony as her fellow Mechanicum adepts. Mars was so clear, its light so sharp, that it struck her like a dagger. The visibility was a reminder of how distant Mars had become.

  Though Vethorel had laboured in the name of the Mechanicum for years on Terra – long before the schism and her being named as Kane’s ambassador – the sight was a tenuous link to the home world. She always knew that when her work was done, she might return there.

  Now it was unattainable. It was held by traitorous hands. Mars had fallen, and the loyalists of the Mechanicum did not have the strength to reclaim it. They could only bear witness to its passage through the heavens.

  Grief. Pain. Experiences that were an unwelcome surprise for many of the tech-priests on the wall. No matter how much of the organic they had sacrificed, they were discovering that they could not so easily leave spiritual agony behind. Vethorel was perhaps fortunate in that she had never expected such immunity for herself. She was human, and she was a daughter of Mars, and she saw no contradiction in those states. The Mechanicum was paradoxical at its core. Fidelity to science meant the worship of the Omnissiah – the Machine and the God, an indivisible phenomenon. The same was true of Vethorel’s devotion to the Imperium and to the Mechanicum, to the preservation of the human and the glory of artifice.

  There were other currents in the silence of the ritual. Other emotions linked to the loss, as pointed as grief, but more immediately dangerous. Frustration, bitterness, doubt, suspicion. From every rise and set of the home world, they grew. Acidic, cancerous, they were something that she had to confront. Vethorel’s concern was that she would be no more able to contain these recriminations than she could retake Mars single-handedly.

  It would, she reflected, be easier if Mars had been conquered by a xenos force. Instead, it needed to be retaken because the Mechanicum itself was sundered, and the split found its symbolic political embodiment in the Binary Succession.

  Even the term itself was fraught. Kelbor-Hal was not dead. He still called himself Fabricator General, but his authority was no longer recognised by Terra. Since Kelbor-Hal’s demonstration of allegiance to Horus, the Council had elevated Zagreus Kane to the role instead.

  And so, now, there were two.

  The one who ruled Mars was declared false. The one recognised by Terra was in exile from his home world.

  The soul of the Mechanicum was in torment. While the higher orders of the priesthood found the choice to be a simple one, too many of the lesser adepts did not know which way to turn, and Kane’s position was precarious enough. Vethorel had long thought about how to deal with what might be coming, since the loyalist exodus from the Red Planet had begun, in fact. The Binary Succession was untenable. It was an equation that demanded resolution.

  Left unresolved, it would generate increasingly chaotic code, and violent action.

  Accessing memory record A-E3445. Designation: Encounter Primus.

  Begin playback.

  The summons had brought her to the lower levels of the Crucible factory complex, below the foundry that produced macro-cannons for the Palace defences. The walls vibrated with the industrial churn. They barely muffled the endless boom and clang, as if immense hammers struck anvils as big as mountains. The run-off of molten metal fell in hissing cataracts from the levels above, and ran in gutters down the sides of the space. Half-burned servitors directed the outflow at lock stations, and the glowing rivers ran into waste tunnels heading still further underground.

  The chamber could not have been more anonymous or forgotten. Vethorel assumed this was why it had been chosen. What was discussed here would have no witnesses beyond the two of them.

  The Fabricator General appeared before her, emerging from a large access tunnel opposite. She gazed at him, and saw the full potential of transformation.

  She had first met Kane here on Terra, two years before the schism. He had been like her then, primarily human in appearance. Now he was a hunched machine, his four-limbed thorax inserted into a tank-like chassis.

  It might have been as though he viewed the fall of Mars as the direct result of the fragility of flesh, and this was both his atonement and his rearmament. Vethorel felt her soul tremble before the sublime. Her mortal form seemed a sad vanity in comparison, and she wondered how anyone could doubt that Kane was the true Fabricator General. His very being gave voice to the will of the Omnissiah.

  ‘Your work on the Throneworld is known to me, adept,’ Kane’s voice-box grated. His human lips, sealed forever by iron, did not move.

  Vethorel bowed her head in gratitude.

  ‘You have a memory implant,’ he added, simply. It was not a question.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then your future recollection of this exchange will be perfect. You have performed effectively as liaison between my forges and political concerns. I need you now for a new task, as ambassador of the Mechanicum to the Council of Terra.’

  Vethorel bowed her head again at the honour. Any greater display would have been inefficient, though wonderment and the determination to be found worthy surged through her organic circuits. ‘You do not seek to liaise with them yourself?’ she queried.

  ‘The gravitational pull of the Council is immense. I cannot afford to be in its grip. It will consume time I do not have. You have a further advantage – your appearance is primarily human. This matters to the Council. They do not trust the machinic. As ambassador, you will be well placed to bridge the two solitudes.’

  ‘I will be that bridge,’ Vethorel vowed. ‘I will be your voice in all things.’

  ‘The voice of the Mechanicum. My presence will be minimal. The authority must be yours. We will consult when necessary, and–’

  End playback.

  Advance to record A-E3500. Designation: Tactical Approval.

  Begin playback.

  The same cavern. A week ago. Vethorel had grown into her role. She saw more clearly what needed to be done for the good of the Mechanicum and the Imperium together. She stood before Kane once more, taller with the strength of her new authority and yet crushed by greater responsibility.

  ‘The divisions in the priesthood are severe,’ she admitted.

  ‘On Terra, as elsewhere. The Binary Succession frustrates all my efforts to unify the forge worlds. The schism threatens to grow.’

  ‘Do you agree, then, to my proposal? Better to bring the crisis to a head, rather than attempt to delay it. We must resolve the equation.’

  The Fabricator General marked his assent with a blurt of code. ‘We will.’

  End playback.

  Mars set. The red light of home vanished. The ceremony ended.

  The tech-priests departed – always in silence, wrapped in their own painful marking of the passage, returning now to their duties on Terra. No words were exchanged, no visible sign of communion except for the simple fact of having been present.

  So it had been every night since the ritual had begun.

  But tonight there was a difference. Two of the priests did not leave. They stayed at their posts before the crenellations, a few yards to the left and right of Vethorel, waiting for the others to go.

  Then they approached her.

  ‘Magos Gerantor, Magos Passax,’ she greeted them, using the speech of the flesh. She felt there would be nuances to this conversation that would be beyond the more blunt absolutes of binaric.

  Gerantor bowed. ‘Ambassador Vethorel. We have questions. You must provide answers.’

/>   So much for nuance, Vethorel thought.

  Both priests were tall. Gerantor was thin, but Passax’s build was so massive that she made him look skeletal, his slender form the very embodiment of binarism. The left side was still organic, though webbed by a dense network of electoos, while the right was entirely machine, with coiling clusters of mechadendrites sprouting from the shoulder and flank. The split occurred along a perfectly straight line down the precise centre of his features. The width of the metal half of his skull was a few millimetres less than the organic side, making it seem as if the flesh had been scraped away to reveal iron beneath.

  Passax no longer had any visible traces of humanity at all. She moved on six, multijointed, insectoid legs. Her frame was powerfully armoured, and tools at the end of her omniflex fingers doubled easily as weapons. Her faceplate still bore the scars of las-burns acquired during the fighting on Mars.

  ‘Many representatives of the Collegia Titanica have come to Terra,’ she said. Where Gerantor’s voice was still recognisable as human from word to word, hers was a deep, grating, mechanical monotone – like large stones rattling in a metal drum.

  ‘You’ve heard, then,’ Vethorel replied. ‘Yes, they have.’

  ‘Is this preparatory to a Martian campaign, ambassador?’ Gerantor demanded.

  ‘No.’ All her weariness from the recent sessions of the Council found expression in that single word. She gestured away over the parapet. ‘They are present as part of the redeployment of the Titan Legions to defend the north-east of the Segmentum Solar.’

  ‘Disappointing. Did you not press our case, ambassador?’

  Gerantor’s repetition of Vethorel’s title turned it into an expression of doubt and annoyance – one that she chose to ignore. ‘I have made the needs of the Mechanicum very clear,’ she replied. ‘I continue to do so.’

  ‘What has that accomplished? Every cycle, more labour is expected of us in the service of the Imperium’s war effort. What have we received in return?’

  ‘We are not the slaves of the Emperor,’ Passax added.

  Vethorel nodded slowly. ‘Indeed, we are not.’

  ‘Then why are we treated as such?’ Gerantor asked quickly.

  Passax jumped in again before Vethorel could respond. ‘There is also the matter of our faith. It is not respected.’

  The ambassador took a breath. ‘I would–’

  ‘The Terran secularists do not conceal their contempt for us,’ Gerantor interrupted her. ‘Where is the equality promised by the treaty?’

  This. This is the way that wars can be lost, Vethorel thought. Treat an ally in such a way that they come to understand the position of the enemy...

  However, she did not let her concern show.

  ‘All of what you say is true,’ she said, plainly.

  Gerantor bristled. ‘And the princeps are not here to reconquer Mars.’

  ‘They are not.’ Vethorel was relieved that he did not appear to grasp the broader implications of the redeployment; what the presence of so many princeps on Terra meant, or what their absence elsewhere would entail. ‘Rest assured, your grievances are mine and those of the Fabricator General too. Matters will improve.’

  ‘How?’ growled Passax.

  ‘The next session of the Council will be a critical one.’

  With that, Vethorel left. She would say no more, and nothing she could say would change the fact that the breaking point had already been reached. At least neither of the magi had gone further than express frustration.

  For now.

  Access memory recording A-E3501. Designation: Recognition of the Suboptimal.

  Begin playback.

  It was in the space below the foundry, surrounded by the rumble of machinery, that they had put an entirely different kind of machine in motion. Vethorel had told Kane what she had in mind. When she had finished, he seemed to consider it for a long while.

  ‘And you are prepared for the likely repercussions, ambassador?’ he asked, finally.

  ‘I am. I perceive the action’s necessity. This is how we will make the Council listen. But the greatest burden will not be mine.’

  The Fabricator General’s faceted eyes gazed past her into the Mechanicum’s rapidly darkening future. ‘Acknowledged. All other actions have failed. Sacred Mars remains beyond our reach – and so, then, does the unity we would require to reclaim it.’ He paused again, his logic circuits running the projections. ‘Confirmed. We have no other choice.’

  ‘No. We do not.’

  End playback.

  Vethorel approached the doors to the Great Chamber of the Council of Terra. She was walking down the centre of a hall wide and high enough for a Warhound to pass.

  Delegations lined the sides, calling out to Council members. She was used to ignoring them. The concerns of the Mechanicum were so far removed from those of the citizens of Terra that she was, at most, a thing of curiosity.

  On her right, a few hundred yards from the doors, she saw a different group. They stood out in their disciplined military posture and starched uniforms, the heraldry of their noble orders emblazoned proudly on polished ceremonial gorgets. They were the representatives of the Collegia Titanica, the Titan Legions – commanders of the God-Machines that could level enemy fortresses and put an army to flight.

  Many of them had their eyes on her. Vethorel slowed her steps and moved across the central aisle.

  ‘Honoured princeps,’ she called out. ‘I wish we met under better circumstances.’

  Two stepped forwards from the rest. She knew them both – Bassanius of Ignatum, and Tevera of Agravaides. The Fire Wasps and the Battle Scourges were noble legios of the Forge World Principal, though they had been off-planet when the Death of Innocence had swept over the plains.

  Bassanius nodded respectfully. ‘I wish we were meeting on Mars, not Terra, Ambassador Vethorel.’

  ‘As do I.’

  ‘As do we all…’ wheezed Tevera. The princeps had lost the use of her limbs many years earlier. Her wasted frame was supported by an exoskeleton, and her voice was strained. Unlike Bassanius, she would command her Titan from an amniotic tank, linked to the manifold. She paused regularly, while her exoskeleton forced her lungs to breathe. ‘We are here to make ourselves heard… The ­timing and manner of this redeployment… is unacceptable.’

  There was a murmur of agreement from the others, but Tevera already knew that she had their support.

  ‘This is a conflict between the primarchs… and the Legiones Astartes–’

  Vethorel cut her short. ‘A conflict that we have all become part of. Or do you think neutrality is somehow possible?’

  ‘We understand the nature of the threat,’ said Bassanius. ‘We understand that the Segmentum Solar must be defended, but what of the forge worlds?’

  Tevera took another pained breath. ‘They are being abandoned to the traitor, without our engines… to guard them. These are hard sacrifices to make.’

  ‘The hardest of all,’ Vethorel conceded.

  Bassanius straightened. ‘And who speaks to us? Who speaks for us? What is the chain of command? For that matter, what is the chain of accountability? These are the concerns of the War Council, of the Emperor and his loyal sons. By what authority do these bureaucratic “High Lords” command us?’

  ‘By the authority of necessity. But I understand – and the Collegia Titanica does have a voice on the Council. The Mechanicum has a voice. Mine.’

  ‘Are you heard?’

  Vethorel faltered. There was no point pretending the political situation was better than it was. ‘Not well enough,’ she muttered.

  ‘This must change…’ said Tevera.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it must.’

  When they realised that Vethorel would say no more, Bassanius gave her another curt nod. The other Titan commanders watched her closely, unwilling to
press any further. It was a provisional truce, making her feel the uncertainty of her position even more acutely, and that of Fabricator General Kane.

  She walked on, passing through the doors and into the Great Chamber, and entered a political theatre where the tiered seating was as much a stage as the central dais. Ten thousand lord-governors, nobles, military officers, administrators and departmental functionaries could meet here at one time, seated according to their perceived status in the hierarchy of the Imperium.

  Vethorel had yet to see the Chamber at capacity, though the crisis was filling more and more of the tiers every day.

  She imagined the cacophony of a full Chamber. It would, she thought, be the worthy accompaniment to the total institutional paralysis that could so easily occur if all of those voices were truly meant to be heard.

  The voices were not heard. In the end, they might as well have been the rolling surf on a bureaucratic ocean. The few voices that actually counted were those of the High Lords, seated in the central rings of the Chamber. At their centre was the grand debating table, headed by the throne of the First Lord of Terra.

  Malcador the Sigillite.

  He was there, looking down upon the others with his cold, unreadable gaze.

  As Vethorel took her appointed place in the third tier, she reflected upon the current political stalemate. She understood that a campaign to retake Mars was not possible at this stage, but the framing of the decision was important. The many slights against Mechanicum loyalists and this cavalier disregard for the concerns of the Collegia Titanica were a formula for new disaster. Would they spell the end of the Council, just over a decade after its formation?

  So today she would speak, and she would make her voice heard.

  Her opportunity came quickly. Harr Rantal, the Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites, raised his concern over the sudden influx of Collegia Titanica officers in the Imperial Palace. Broad of shoulder and of voice, he spoke with enormous assurance of command. His influence – as measured by the power of the arbitrators to enforce Imperial Law – was great, but he carried himself as if he truly believed that he was only a short step below the pri­marchs themselves.