The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  Even so, Pentasian looked up as if he could see the shadow of the Imperator pressing against the exterior walls of the Chamber. His face was ashen. ‘We concur with Ambassador Vethorel,’ he mumbled. ‘There will be an Adeptus Mechanicus, to resolve the… the specific conflicts of succession within the Martian contingent on Terra.’

  Malcador spoke then. His tone was hard, unbowed.

  ‘And what does the Mechanicum propose in return? Tell me, ambassador, do you expect the Council to be held hostage indefinitely? The Adeptus Mechanicus will be a voice on the Council, but it cannot be the only voice.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Rantal growled. ‘This must never be allowed to happen again.’

  He was not posturing. He had reached his limit. Vethorel could hear his conviction and his determination. If she pushed him any further, his duty as commander of the arbitrators would force him to push back.

  Then the nightmare would truly be unleashed.

  Malcador nodded slowly, rapping his staff on the marble floor of the dais. ‘There will be conditions. If Fabricator General Zagreus Kane is now to ascend to the ranks of the High Lords, he must permit us some concessions as a gesture of good faith. But we will discuss such things only when the officers of the Titan Legions remove themselves from this Chamber.’

  This was the price that had to be paid, now. Kane had to restore trust, and Vethorel’s boldness had ensured that the price of that trust would likely be high indeed.

  Vethorel met with Bassanius and Tevera at the feet of Magnificum Incendius. The Imperator had halted its march barely a hundred yards from the walls of the Great Chamber. It stood in the centre of the two kilometre-wide Avenue of the Imperial Awakening. Its banners flapped in the strong wind, low clouds tore themselves across the peak of its battlements. The God-Machine faced towards the Chamber – a sentinel once more, but a fearsome one.

  The thronging crowd in the avenue gave the Titan a wide berth, while Ignatum protector squads stood guard around the bastion-like entrances to its lower legs. At the same time, the adepts and officials of the Palace slowed and gazed upwards at the engine, mesmerised by the source of their recent terror.

  Bassanius stood with a proprietorial pride before the God-Machine, with Tevera beside him.

  ‘Is this what you hoped to achieve, ambassador?’ he asked.

  ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus is becoming a reality,’ Vethorel replied. ‘And so is the Adeptus Titanicus. Mars has been promised to us all once more, in exchange for our full-hearted compliance in the defence of Terra, now.’

  ‘But the Titan Legions still have no voice of their own,’ Tevera wheezed. ‘We are enthralled… to Zagreus Kane and the alliances he forms for his own purposes.’

  ‘No, you will have agency through Zagreus Kane. He honours all of the ancient oaths, the old bonds between the priesthood and the loyal commanders of the God-Machines, and he insists that you be recognised by Terra. This is the oldest alliance, renewed at the Imperium’s greatest time of need and named “Adeptus”.’

  Vethorel gestured to the Great Chamber.

  ‘The Council decrees that the legios must act in defence of the Segmentum Solar, and so they shall, but the nature of the deployment will be under the authority of the Fabricator General. In exchange for this service, he will ensure that the lesser forge worlds do not remain undefended – they will be protected and fortified by the Adeptus Mechanicus while the Titans march to war.’

  Bassanius raised an eyebrow. ‘And what of the Treaty of Olympus? Is it dead?’

  ‘The Treaty…’

  She stopped, looking off into the direction of the Stellarum Vigil, thinking about the much-needed glimpse of their lost home world that she would have in a few hours’ time.

  ‘The Treaty remains in place, though Mars itself does not observe it. I have faith in the Omnissiah, and that we loyal few will take back the Red Planet, when the time is right. For now, though, the home of the Adeptus Mechanicus is on Terra.’

  ‘But what does that mean for us?’

  ‘It means that the chain of command in the conduct of this war will have a clear order. Neither Mechanicus nor Titanicus can hope to shape the Council’s decisions, then ignore them whenever they choose. The decisions we will help to inform are also the ones by which we must abide. It is not the perfect outcome, but I believe it is the best that could be obtained.’

  The two princeps exchanged a look. Then Tevera turned back to Vethorel. ‘So, this is our victory…’

  ‘A victory?’ the ambassador queried. ‘Against whom? There will be no victory until Horus is defeated.’ She thought about what had already been lost, what had already been destroyed. ‘I don’t think the Imperium will ever have a triumphant victory again. Those days are behind us.’

  ‘So we gain influence and lose our autonomy,’ Bassanius sighed. ‘And for what?’

  ‘The gain is greater than the loss. I do believe this. The Binary Succession is ended. There is only the Adeptus Mechanicus now, not temporary but permanent. There shall only ever be but one Fabricator General, and all loyal children of Mars who would hold true to their faith must follow his command, for the good of all mankind.’

  Vethorel looked up at the Imperator. It had halted only a step or two from catastrophe. Just as on the Stellarum Vigil, she had been one unlucky blow away from death and failure.

  The way forward was narrow and shadowed, but they were all embarked upon it, now.

  There was only one path, and it led through the furnace of war.

  The Magnificum Incendius approaches the Great Chamber

  Perpetual

  Dan Abnett

  They had been living, against their will, in the city on the lip of the cliff for nearly two years.

  Two years that seemed like two centuries to Oll Persson – which was odd, because Oll Persson was used to the grand passage of time. He was one of the rare ones. One of the mythical beings. A vestigial side-branch of the human race that had been born with unique gifts.

  One of those gifts was functional immortality.

  Oll was old. He had lived multiple lifetimes, so many that he had forgotten most of them. He had no idea of his actual age any more. A man tended to lose precise count somewhere after his one hundred and fiftieth birthday. Oll’s best guess was that he was around forty-five thousand years old. Give or take.

  Two years was an interlude to one of the Perpetuals. A sunny afternoon. A long lunchtime.

  But not these two years. They had dragged out like a hard term, a relentless prison sentence.

  Frustration did that. Frustration and anxiety.

  They were lost. They were stuck. Their long, haphazard trek across the wrinkled folds of un-space had brought them to the city, and there the path had run out.

  ‘When are we, again?’ asked Zybes. All the members of their little band had become used to framing this odd question. Not where they were, but when.

  ‘I think,’ Oll replied, ‘the tail end of M23.’

  He glanced at Zybes, and knew this answer would need expansion.

  ‘Circa twenty-three thousand AD, by the old calendar. The last few centuries of the Dark Age of Technology.’

  ‘Which is…?’ asked Zybes, pausing in the middle of his meal, a heel of bread hoisted to his mouth but forgotten.

  ‘During the long rebellion of the Iron Men,’ said Katt. ‘The cataclysm that led to the… uh… Malthusian Catastrophe.’

  ‘You remembered,’ said Oll.

  ‘I listen,’ she replied, glancing at Zybes. ‘Not like him. I remember your words, even if I don’t really understand what they mean.’

  At the start of their journey, which had been less of an embarkation and more of a frantic flight from the atrocity at Calth, Oll’s policy had been to tell them very little. The members of his band – Zybes, Katt, Krank, Rane and the agricultural servitor Graft – were ju
st survivors. They had not been chosen or called like him. Oll had brought them with him out of pity, because he had a way out of the slaughter, and it seemed cruel to prevent them from sharing it.

  Moreover, they were humans. Mortals, with the exception of the cyborg Graft. Oll had kept truths from them, because he’d been afraid of polluting their brief, limited lives with deep-scale information about the universe. That kind of knowledge might wound them on an existential level and drive them to insanity. How could any of them ever return to normal, mortal lives if he shared the immortal things that he knew with them?

  However, their escape from Calth had turned into a trek, and the trek had turned into six years.

  Six years of slicing reality open with a knife and slipping from one now to another. Six years of their questions. How do you open space with a knife? Where are we going? Who are you? Where are we now?

  When are we now?

  In the long run, it had become simpler just to answer them and explain things. They didn’t understand most of it, but they nodded sagely at his stories and explanations, grateful at least to be offered some answers.

  The girl Katt, brighter than most, remembered. She stored things up in that unusual brain of hers, and could recite back many of the truths that Oll had told them.

  Oll sometimes wondered why he had decided to answer their questions. To shut them up, was the simple explanation. But after a while, it had occurred to him that the more they knew, the better they could help him.

  One day, in an atomic bunker a kilometre beneath the pole of a dead colony world, he had told them the big picture.

  ‘Life hangs in the balance,’ he had said.

  Krank frowned. ‘Whose life?’

  ‘Mostly, everyone’s. What happened on Calth, and what happened to us there – it was part of the End War. A war that could rip our species apart.’

  ‘Whose side are we on?’ asked Bale Rane, the young soldier.

  ‘The Emperor’s, of course!’ Graft had whirred.

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ Oll replied. As it happened, Oll Persson had little time or liking for the thing that men called the Emperor. But that was beside the point, a personal matter. If you didn’t stand with the Emperor, you stood with the others. The usurpers.

  And the usurpers were not creatures that any sane man would want to throw his lot in with.

  So, yes. They stood with the Emperor.

  ‘I’m old,’ Oll had said to them.

  ‘We know!’ laughed Rane.

  ‘I mean… I’m older than you can imagine. I wanted no part of this war. I just wanted a quiet life. But I got recruited. Roped in.’

  ‘By who?’ Katt asked.

  ‘A friend of mine. He needs me to go to Terra, so that’s where we’re going.’

  ‘Terra!’ gasped the seasoned army veteran Dogent Krank, amazed. ‘In all my days, I never dreamed I’d end up there, on the Throneworld.’

  ‘Right. And what do we do when we reach Terra?’ Zybes asked.

  Oll had thought about that. Even though he was being more free with his answers, there were still some that he didn’t want to give.

  ‘Whatever we can,’ he muttered. ‘Okay?’

  The trek had been long, and arduous, and perilous, but at the city on the lip of the cliff, it had ground to a standstill. The ancient compass that Oll carried, the one that could read the winds of the empyrean, had stopped working. There was no way to know where to cut next, or what bearing to aim for. They were becalmed, marooned with no way forward.

  Sometimes the winds could die down, so at first Oll had presumed it was going to be a minor delay. But days became months, and months became two years. They had set up a home in the city, and spent their days wandering the back lanes and alleys hunting for a spot where the compass might start to twitch again.

  The city was a deep, meandering place of dark stone. The locals called it Andrioch. It was a human colony from the days of the first stellar exodus, and Oll fancied that it had once been magnificent. But there had been some sort of misadventure, probably due to the technology wars that marred this bleak era of humanity. The dark stone of the city was dark because it was stained, perhaps with soot or by radiation burns. The cliff that the city overhung plunged away into the centre of the world. If you peered down, you could see, through the clouds of vapour, the glow of the magmatic furnace that was the planet’s core, far below.

  He thought Andrioch had likely been twice this size, once. Half of it looked to have been torn away by whatever created the cliff. There were weapons in the older days that could do it: weapons of immeasurable power, tech devices employed by both the Iron Men and the alliances that stood against their cybernetic revolt.

  Oll remembered the horror of entropic engines that ignited planets. Sun-snuffers that uncoiled like serpents the size of Saturn’s rings. Mechnivores ingesting data along with the cities that contained them and hurling continents into the heavens. Omniphage swarms stripping flesh from a billion bones in the blink of an eye. Those were the good old days, when war was something too colossal for a human mind to comprehend.

  Not like the End War. The Warmaster’s heresy was a smaller thing, scaled for human and post-human brains.

  But it was bigger in some ways. Yes, bigger than the god-like struggle of the cybernetic revolt. Bigger in scope, bigger in its implications. More horrible, because humanity could apprehend it and drive it.

  Although he did not say so, Oll Persson believed that a mechnivore had bitten Andrioch in two. A rogue unit, perhaps – though by that latter stage of the revolt, almost all machines were rogue, their abominable intelligence querulously hunting for friends but perceiving everything as enemies.

  The citizens of Andrioch were pale ghosts, like things that had lived in a cave, lacking colour or health or effective eyesight. Their skin was translucent. They did not interact with Oll and his band, but spent their days and nights in the rotting pits of their dwellings, wired into constant data-feeds sutured into their eyes and scalps, feeding off some illusion of normal life while they waited for the Mechaniclysm to end.

  For them, it never would. Their bodies would wither and die, and they would come to exist only as a virtual spectre, the memory of a city stored in a digital gestalt.

  Oll was determined not to join them. But the trek was dangerous, and he realised that there was another reason he had started answering the questions his band asked him.

  None of them were ever going to go back to normal lives. He’d been fooling himself. He could tell them anything he liked, because they were never going to rejoin the ordinary again. They would probably die on the path, sooner or later, and if they made it to Terra as Dogent Krank so fervently wished, they would die there anyway.

  Oll had been weak. On balance, it would have been a greater kindness to leave them on Calth to perish.

  That was typical of him. Ollanius Persson had always been too merciful for his own good. A bad trait in a soldier, especially a soldier charged with such a vital mission.

  He sighed, staring into their campfire. ‘Two years. We can’t linger here any longer.’

  He didn’t dare tell the others how worried he was, because then they’d realise there were some questions to which even Oll the Pious didn’t know the answer.

  There was no way forward. No route around. The only way out of Andrioch was to go back, to retrace their steps, and John Grammaticus had warned Oll never, ever to do that.

  Oll wandered the alleys where the city leaned over the cliff. He thought he could see the actual bite marks.

  He was pretty sure that the cliff itself was the problem. Andrioch was the next step in the trek, but they had arrived there too late. The mechnivore, or whatever other rogue behemoth had preyed on the place, had consumed more than just the physical city and the planetary crust beneath.

  It had eaten data.

 
Not simply the digital data stored in Andrioch’s analytic engines, but the raw data of space-time itself. It had bitten away the vital set of empyreal coordinates that Oll needed, the cosmic vectors of the immaterium that his silver compass and little jet pendulum responded to. The hole they had spent two years living beside was more than a material hole. It was a wound in the ether, the anti-reality that coexisted with the physical universe.

  Andrioch perched on the edge of a bite mark in the warp.

  The question was: was this situation pure misfortune, or something deliberate?

  He believed the latter. There was no doubt in his mind that agents of the enemy were pursuing them. Indeed, he was sure that they had accumulated several enemies – daemons, Word Bearers seeker-legionaries, and the assassins of the Cabal.

  But this was not a simple, hostile threat. Someone had steered them, or influenced them. Someone had tricked them into taking the misstep to Andrioch, knowing that they could go no further.

  ‘Oll!’

  He heard someone calling his name. He paid it little heed. His mind was old, and the memory of ancient voices haunted him from time to time.

  Then he realised it was a real voice.

  ‘Oll! Oll!’

  There, on the black stones of the broken causeway ahead of him, right on the lip of the endless cliff, stood John Grammaticus. ‘Bit of a mess,’ he called out. ‘Sorry.’

  Oll clambered up to join him. ‘We’re stuck here, John. This is a dead end.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We’ve been here two years.’

  John looked aghast. ‘Two? I’m sorry. I’ve been caught up in things. Well, the Cabal caught up with me. Again. They’re putting me back to work for them. I’ve been waiting for a moment when their eyes aren’t on me so I could reach out to you. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘They’re onto you, too,’ John warned. He was wearing the dress uniform of a photon lancer from the Unification Wars. It was rather too ornamental for Oll’s taste, but John’s mind had chosen his form and appearance. He wasn’t really there. Oll didn’t have to reach out and touch the wet nothingness of a psionic projection to know that.