by David Guymer
‘The machine does not have to be cold and unfeeling.’ The voice Rauth had heard. It was emerging from a speaker tube near to where many of the adepts had been kneeling. ‘The purpose is enhancement, not diminishment, so why give away what makes us most human, most alive? The art of the machine can enhance emotion and sensation as well as take it away, and the Omnissiah desires this gift be bestowed equally upon all, low and high…’
Rauth dragged his attention back to the whimpering civilians behind the tables.
They were frightened, defenceless, weak. They were culpable. He wanted to start killing, but some mental block kept his finger from pulling any tighter on the trigger. He remembered the promise he had once made to himself, to be better than those that trained him, and he lowered his shotgun. Just as he did so Khrysaar pushed in behind and brought up his bolter, only for Maarvuk to grab the barrel and force it down.
‘No,’ Maarvuk said. ‘Is Rauth the only one amongst you with a clear head? Do it quietly.’
Mouth dry, Rauth wordlessly accepted the sergeant’s interpretation of his inaction. Maarvuk clumped past him, unstoppable, the visible bionic sinew in his massive arms clicking as he closed his fingers around the underside of the diagnosticae table and wrenched it from its floor fittings. The adepts barely had time to cry out as several tonnes of subtle technologies were lifted above their heads. Some of the adepts gave gurgling spasms as the table rediscovered the floor and crushed them in half. Whirring with pleasure, Maarvuk then put creaking gauntlets to the table again and, deaf to the desperate wails of those who had managed to crawl out from under it, pushed it over once more.
Khrysaar and the others strode past Rauth and into the instrumentarium with mechanical precision. No inefficiency was allowed, including dulling blades, not when the bludgeoning might of their fists was perfectly sufficient to demolish mortal skulls, augmented or not. That such insignificants as these could have had no role in introducing their tainted doctrine had, by their inaction, become irrelevant. Their crime was one of permission. When it was done, the only noise was that of the voice coming through the augmitter. Gorgorus put one wrecking fist through it, knuckle deep into the backing plasteel.
The ensuing quiet was, in its own way, as deafening as a fusillade of bolter-fire would have been.
Sickened, as much with himself as with the callous ruin left by his brothers, Rauth reassured himself of his grip on his shotgun and looked around.
His first impression that this was an ancillary diagnosticae suite, part of Locis Primus’ data-harvesting operations, appeared to be borne out by the myriad arcana on display. Even Rauth, his experience of such temples to science minimal, could see that it had been superficially altered. Oil burners smoked from workstations, balanced in cup holders, giving off an acrid pheremonal scent that was that same sickly blend he’d smelled earlier. Halting images of the Machine God had been drawn on screens, but man and machine halves had been inverted from the standard imagery. It was subtly, profoundly wrong.
The alien technologies that had been under analysis were hooked up through convoluted interface set-ups, so numerous and bulky that they almost filled the room. They looked ancient, inhuman, eldar perhaps or something akin to them, but Rauth was no expert. Nevertheless, something about them made his flesh want to crawl into his augmetics. The expressions on his brothers’ faces showed they felt it too.
And that smell.
Rauth’s nose wrinkled in disgust. ‘Can we do anything from here?’
‘No,’ Gorgorus replied. ‘This is a diagnosticae ward, nothing more.’
‘Then let’s move on.’
‘Wait, look at this.’ Suforr called them over to the wall on the opposite side of the upended table. It was curiously unmarked by illicit imagery or blemishes, and as Rauth drew nearer he saw why. It was not a wall, but a window, the plastek formulated so that it became transparent only from within a certain distance. It was to here that the priests had been directing their prayers when Rauth had first entered.
He soon saw the reason for that too. And why they had encountered no guards.
In line with his assessment that the outer circuit pathway circumnavigated the core of the shard, the window looked down over the core. At the bottom was an auditorium, long and narrow as the shard was wide and high, surrounded by thirty to forty metres of tinted glass, coiled wires and girdered plasteel. Directly beneath the slanted ceiling’s highest point was a podium upon which stood the single most spectacularly invidious skitarius that Rauth could have tried and failed in his most disturbed Catalepsean cycles to imagine.
Its limbs were elongated, its hands golden and immaculate. The integration between body and armour was phased and perfect, presenting a rainbow composite of metallic shades from mirrored silvers to deep lustrous coppers, all overlain and subtly accentuated by a gauze of alchemical sprays and crimson. For the high-purity quartzes and gemstones that decorated the skitarius’ armour Rauth could name dozens of practical applications, but they had been duplicated to such extravagant extent that the intent could only have been morbidly decorative. It paced about the podium with a fluid, languid stride, gesticulating as it moved.
A bodyguard of hyper-augmented skitarii alphas made a cordon around the dais, reinforced considerably by the presence of a trio of horrifically debased Kastelan battle robots. The irreplaceable Legio Cybernetica relics had human features etched onto their bulb heads, their large rounded shoulders draped in cloaks of vat-grown human flesh. More disturbing still, Rauth could see that their doctrina wafers had been removed, cut out by men with neither the blessing of the Omnissiah nor the skill, and replaced with something delicate and organic that Rauth could not make out. Logic told him that the maligned battle robots would not function at all, but there was precious little logic to take solace in here.
Despite being physically incapable of biological sickness, he felt something in his stomach turn at the display.
So intent was he on the grotesquery on the podium, that he had given no thought to the podium itself, thinking it another rushed assembly of spare parts and scrap metal, until he noticed it move. This time he felt his throat tighten, a remembered impulse bringing his hand to his mouth.
The princeps, or whatever it was, walked on a pulpit made from the bent backs of his own bionically mangled faithful. There were many layers of them, joyously on all fours to raise their glittering princeps high above the heads of his congregation. And of them there were many, tens of thousands of malformed bio-constructs packed into the auditorium below, and perhaps as many again watching and listening from galleries like this one. Rauth realised that the princeps was delivering a sermon, or an address of some kind to rouse his legion followers to war, but without the augmitter that Gorgorus had destroyed it was impossible to know. Perhaps that was for the best. In fact he knew full well that it was, but a terrible curiosity made Rauth stretch out his hand and touch fingers to the plastek.
The vibrations ran up his arm and into his Lyman’s ear like a half-felt sense of unease.
‘What basis in logic can there be for an imperfect being, however exalted over fellow imperfect beings, to judge the worth or unworth of you, or you, or you. Or I? This is how I see the lie in the source code of the great algorithm of Mars. It is for the Machine God alone to decide who is worthy of His perfection and who is not. Let them take our gifts away. Let them try. They cannot but fail because it is we who are perfect…’
With a shiver of horror and the still powerful urge to damn his anatomy and vomit, he drew his hand back and looked away. He blinked, his breathing hoarse and hot in his throat, elated almost at the intensity of the sensation, and turned to Maarvuk. He had been expecting censure for exposing his soul to the ramblings of the apostate, but what he received was an expulsion of turgid fluids from the veteran-sergeant’s feed hoses and rebreather. ‘Father!’ Rauth reeled as organoserum sprayed his face and Maarvuk crashed to the floor
.
Rauth wiped his face and looked around to see the other Scouts seizing madly. All except Khrysaar, who gave him a look of horror and revulsion that Rauth could well imagine his own face returning.
‘What on Terra!’ Khrysaar cursed.
‘Don’t just stand there. Get them away from the window.’
Khrysaar hauled ineffectually on Gorgorus until the bulkier Scout’s random spasms sent an elbow crashing into his forehead. He fell on his back with a grunt of anger and immediately went for his knife.
Kill him!
Rauth blinked back the sudden compulsion. ‘For once in your existence, don’t be an idiot.’
Gorgorus’ strike hadn’t been deliberate, that much should have been obvious. Gorgorus’ face was a contortion of badly suppressed, contradictory emotions: hate, wonder, repugnance, awe, fury, transfixed on the view of the auditorium. Foam bubbled from his mouth as he stutteringly drew a fist to smash out the transparent plastek; blood wormed out of some remnant capillary to trickle from the corner of his eye, then the whole neuro-mechanical conflation surrendered to the pressure. The force of the aneurysm smashed Gorgorus’ face into the workstation.
‘Throne!’
Rauth leapt away from him. Khrysaar crawled on his back. He wasn’t sure which of them had spoken.
Sarrk screamed in surreal, bloody outrage and began to head-butt the transparency, the plastek splintering with every successive blow. Suforr merely stared into empty space until smoke curled from his mouth.
‘What’s got into them?’ yelled Khrysaar.
Why not us? ‘Do I look like the Omnissiah to you?’
Gorgorus’ bionics continued to feed him with pulses of disgusted fury, standing him up only to pitch him over soon after as outraged systems tried to make him climb up onto the workstation. Sarrk’s skull had cracked open, but he continued to smash it witlessly into the plastek.
‘Witchcraft.’ Khrysaar. ‘We have to kill them all.’
‘Put down the knife.’
‘It’s the Omnissiah’s mercy. They’ll thank us for it. I’ll not have my strength judged lacking.’
Rauth laughed. Suddenly, bizarrely. It felt… good. ‘It already is.’
The shadows around Khrysaar’s facial augmentations deepened. His creamy optic glinted blindly as he pointed his knife at Rauth. Rauth’s heart whooshed frantically, as though pursued by something abhorrent and wondrous. I love you, brother.
‘As if I ever cared what you thought,’ Khrysaar said.
The click and scrape of an unholstered bolt pistol drew their attention apart, Khrysaar’s blade holding the place between them. They looked to the ground, at Maarvuk, his immovable metal-scaled features locked in a non-expression of irresolvable emotion. The machine does not have to be cold and unfeeling. The words of the traitor princeps ran around and around and around in Rauth’s head as the veteran-sergeant drew his bolt pistol and pushed it up under his own chin.
Imperfect.
‘No!’ Rauth and Khrysaar yelled together.
‘Weak,’ Maarvuk muttered.
And fired.
VIII
Melitan could not move.
She had never thought herself a coward. She had braved the horrors of Dumaar and his apothecarion almost every day for seven years. She had faced Iron Chaplain Braavos and Sergeant Stronos, with trepidation, yes, but not with fear. And considering that she had never faced down a lasrifle in her life, she could convince herself that she had acquitted herself well and gone some way towards justifying the logi-legatus’ faith in her.
But now, for no reason at all, she could push herself no further.
A torrent of heavy bolter-fire drove her deeper into cover, an old foxhole ringed with barbed wire, partially roofed by a fallen stanchion and a sheet of rad-blackened armourglass. She could see Ares ahead where he stood in the middle of the no-man’s-land. Explosive plumes tore up out of the ground around him, tracers strafing past and across but never quite hitting. She was watching a miracle in microcosm. As if the Omnissiah could not bear to lay a finger upon His own.
But still she could not move.
Feeling a hand on her back, she started, took an ill-advised gulp of upcycled oxygen and began to cough. The high concentration, low moisture air of her rebreather was technically efficient, but hell on her parchment-thin throat-wall and ruined lungs.
‘We have to get to him,’ said Callun. Of all the adepts, he was the only one still standing. Even after a twenty hour double shift, he never had been able to sit down.
They had been trailing Ares’ advance on the god-machine, Pax Medusan, for the last half hour, logging his bellowed imprecations against his ‘Sapphire King’ for later cross reference against the simulus archive, but now he had stopped. No more shouting, no more firing. Just stopped. And as soon as he had, Sergeant Ankaran and the other Iron Hands she had thought to be her escort had wasted no time whatsoever in pushing on with their own objectives, abandoning Melitan and her charges to their hole in the ground.
She looked up at the Titan, concussive explosions rippling through her flesh and bones, as if she had come face to face with a new and greater deity than she had previously known. Tears forced their way from her eyes as she struggled to separate her faith, loyalty, devotion to Ares and hatred of the Iron Hands generally from her spiritual love for the majesty of the Machine. For some reason she thought of Stronos, their conversation aboard the Onslaught.
They were not all alike.
‘Melitan.’ Callun shook her again, this time urgently. ‘Someone has to go out there and bring him back.’ She regarded him as if he had suddenly started to speak a different language. He gave her a moment to answer, and when she struggled to find one he gave her shoulder an understanding squeeze. A faint smile creased his eyes, as full of life and energy as she had always known them. ‘Wait here. I’ll see what I can do for him and then come straight back.’
Melitan opened her mouth to countermand him, but nothing came out. She hated herself. ‘A-all right,’ she managed as Callun took her blessing rod, her pabulum and oils, and she offered only mute protest as he checked back with a fleeting peck on the forehead, then wriggled under the barbed wire fencing and began to run towards Ancient Ares.
>>> SOURCE >>> SARDONIS
>>> ORIGIN >>> ARES, TUBRIIK
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 002013.M32
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
He forced his sensors >>> eyes >>> FILE CORRUPTION >>> to open, allowing in a confusion of stimuli. He could smell burning flesh and baked ceramite. He had no olfactory sense. He could see a riot of sound and colour. He could not see >>> The Sapphire King remained nearby, screams and bolt hails bleeding through the twin streams of contradictory inputs.
‘We have to get you out of here.’
Someone was trying to move him. He could feel manual override jacks being plugged into his central nexus >>> pulling on his arms and dragging him from where he remembered seeing the daemon manifest. It was Darvo >>> Darrvo >>> Apothecary Darrvo.
Clan Garrsak had no Apothecary by that name. They must have been reinforced. That made no sense either. Last report had Clans Raukaan and Sorrgol more than a day away.
‘I am finished, brother. Tend to those that can still use your aid. I promise to still be here when you return.’
‘Please. We are in danger.’
‘Leave me. That is an order.’
The Apothecary began to mutter a prayer to the Omnissiah >>> to the Emperor, and Ares felt something in him drawn forth by the words. The parallel streams of consciousness began to run together, the burnt, charnel stink of Sardonis receding into ancient memory to be replaced by… by…
Nothing.
>>> ‘No. I choose the Emperor’s mercy, as is my right. I will not become the iron.’
‘Please.’ Urgent now.
‘N
o! I have seen our future and it is beyond saving. I refuse to persist in a shell and watch all around me perish.’
‘That is simulus corruption >>> the daemon talking. You are Ancient >>> Iron Captain Tubriik Ares. Do not surrender to it.’
‘Let us all perish,’ he said, ignoring the Apothecary >>> the adept’s struggles, and allowed his life support systems to fail.
>>> FILE CORRUPTION
>>> TERMINATING SIMULUS
>>> TERMINATING…
>>> END OF DATA.
IX
Stronos came off the vox, the bunker shaking under a direct hit. Pax Medusan was finding its range.
‘How long before we can expect reinforcement?’ said Vand, looking up from his study of the operations board.
‘Indeterminate. But not long. For now, keep working.’
‘Yes, brother.’
Leaving his brother to his labours, Stronos ducked outside and into the low gravity particle shower the last impact had made fall. Shielding the workings of his bionic eye under his gauntlet, he zoomed in on Adept Yolanis’ coordinates, scanning the crushed terrain for any sign of the promised priest. He caught a flutter of crimson, auto-centred and focused – a running man – a split-second before the wreckage he was tearing through exploded.
X
Melitan screamed as Callun, Ares, and everything in a radius of about fifty metres disappeared in the dust-wash thrown up by the shell that had landed right on top of them. She could still feel Callun’s unmasked lips on her forehead, and screamed even as dust began to encrust her goggles and the world turned yellow. She had done this. Her ambitions. Her failures. She screamed Callun’s name until she began to weep and found she hadn’t breath enough to scream Ares’. She didn’t know who she expected to hear her. She could barely hear herself, the plink of raining armour muffled by the thin atmosphere and a wall of sand.