by Guy Haley
Domina Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma, supreme magos militara of Trisolian, was not pleased when Cawl reached the Extraction Protection Operations Centre in Quinta station.
She whirled around to face him as he hurried through the door, all six spiked, aggressive metres of her.
'Tech Acolytum Belisarius Cawl,' she augmitted in simultaneous Gothic, binaric, Ryzan-form Lingua Technis and an obscure form of Novabyte Cawl had only ever heard from her vox-speakers. 'You're late.' The noosphere around her seethed with digital animosity. Pistons and gears whined as a dozen tech-adepts tensed under the domina's wide-cast anger.
'I am late, domina,' said Cawl, with a short bow, attempting to hurry past her to his station. 'I am most sorry, I have been delayed with experiments of my own and—'
'Silence!' she blurted. A torrent of binaric invective poured out of her, so vile in nature Tez-Lar twitched. She ran at Cawl, her mechapeds rattling off the deck like stubber fire punching through a corrugated plasteel sheet. 'Tardiness is proximate to inefficiency. Inefficiency is proximate to obsolescence. Do you wish me to enact an order of decommission?'
'No, domina,' said Cawl. He hunched low and grovelled. The domina liked that sort of thing from her inferiors.
'Or perhaps you would prefer to join my skitarii, in order to serve me better. They, tech acolytum, are never, ever late!'
Cawl glanced sideways to the door where a pair of the domina's personal guard stood sentry. Resplendent in brass and grey, they were as inert as robots, with no sign of independent life. The domina's skitarii were little better than tech thralls. Rumour had it she kept their cortexes offline, operating them directly at all times. Their minds were trapped in a perpetual rapture, drugged by communion with the Motive Force. Some of the machine cult would welcome the fate, but Cawl quailed inwardly at the thought. Independence was all to him.
'To your place!' The domina reared up to her full height. Her loose robe parted a moment, allowing a glimpse of the metal canisters attached to her chest like so many swine at the teat. The cylinders rattled across a patchwork of copper cabling and plasteel plates, the things inside fed by a tangle of wires and tubes. She snatched her gown back across them. 'The second shift is due to commence its descent into the middle reaches, and they are waiting for our support. Impatiently Waiting.'
'Once again, my apologies, domina,' said Cawl. He sent Tez-Lar away to his own station with a pulsed thought code.
Aspertia Sigma-Sigma swept off, mechadendrites waving around her shoulders like serpents ready to strike.
'Provost Acquisitor Mu-Nine-Nine, we are ready to provide escort.'
A steel-faced adept appeared on a floating pict screen, painted in shades of blue and heavily banded with image writing lines. All the viewers on the station were of that type. Their projection elements were made of semi-living light-emitting diodes whose chemistry was harvested from deep sea bacteria. This form of display resisted the radioactive squalls of the system best.
Cawl had learned how to make the displays during a brief stint working for a Lexmechanic Imagificatio. It was amazing what one could pick up in a place like Trisolian.
Extraction Protection Operations was a five-tiered room fronted by a massive, semi-circular window looking down on Etrian. At the left edge of the view Heptaligon Station Quarta was visible as an oblate, steely mirror reflecting the planet's glow. The tether-tube holding it out from the moon was a needle of light. At the bottom of the window the crusted surface of Momus lurked. The sun bathed everything in a snowfield glare so harsh it was painful to look upon.
The tiers of the room were full of control decks for the protection automata, and each one was lavishly supplied with imaging equipment that shone with the same, uncompromising light. Cawl hurried down three flights of stairs to his station and slipped into the uncomfortable chair. Tri-d light weaves popped up around him. A miniature hololith flicked on directly in front of his face. Status readouts for the three drones under his command activated as the desk sensed his presence. Auto-prayers burbled from its speakers as the machine self-blessed.
The drones were presented as red, outline schematics, their outer surfaces rendered translucent to show the condition of the subsystems beneath their armour. Automaton One's port engines glowed a troubling orange.
Cawl tutted. He had been told Automaton One had been repaired. He glanced back at the domina. She was engaged in conversation with the provost acquisitor. Her primary hands were still twitching with annoyance. Now was not the time to bring it up.
Cawl pulled out a steel-cased communion cable and slotted it into a socket behind his ear. The spring retractor was overwound and the cable pulled annoyingly at the side of his head, forcing his neck into an uncomfortable position.
He partitioned his consciousness, parcelling it out between the three automata and the flight desk. Facilitated by his superior intelligence core, the view in his mind's eye split into quadrants. The top of his field of vision was occupied by the view of the operations room gathered by his mortal eyes. The lower half was split into three pict fields, each showing a view from one of the automata's augurs. In the sharp images, the world of Etrian loomed large.
'Stand by for clamp retraction!' The domina half sang the words. They were accompanied by a data-rich stream of binaric. A quartet of eyeless servitors began a hymn of safe launching. Tez-Lar joined his rich voice to the song at a silent command from Cawl.
The real world retreated. Screed rolled up the side of Cawl's view; the back and forth between the domina and the provost acquisitor rendered into glowing green text and the runs of zeroes and ones of rapid, augment-to-augment binaric.
A larger panel of text blinked through his awareness.
He swivelled Automaton Two's visual array downwards. Five extractor scows were dropping fast towards Trisolian A-2, They were massive things, not true spacecraft but large, raft-like structures crewed by adepts garbed in huge, armoured environment suits. Bulky servitors and rad-hardened automata assisted them. Reminiscent of the baleen of extinct Terran cetaceans, the scows' fronts sported huge, spreading vanes of copper, between which were threaded thousands of kilometres of fine wires. These 'jaws' projected a magnetic funnel that directed the desired gases into separation units. From there the harvest was pumped into bulbous clusters of containment tanks running the length of the vessel.
Dozens of massive hemispherical directional impellers occupied the scows' undersides. Viewed side-on, the grav-motors and the power plants to run them dominated the craft, like the hidden portions of icebergs. They made up the majority of the craft's mass. Etrian had a hard pull.
The extractor scows dropped fast towards the racing clouds of the gas giant. The tiny figures walking the decks dwindled to dots.
'Flight release,' commanded the domina. And by her thoughts and her words, so it was done.
'All praise the Machine-God. All praise the Omnissiah who is his messenger. All praise the Motive Force by which he moves among us,' the drone operators chanted.
Cawl's split view lurched and the three-part image diversified. If he didn't concentrate, the conflicting input would make him nauseous. His charges were falling. Thruster bursts sent them hurtling after the falling scows. The crewed decks flashed past, he had the briefest glimpse of an armoured adept directing his underlings, then the scows were above his machines. The clouds raced up to greet him.
The robots were practically autonomous. Their programming took them down into the surging currents of the gas giant without much input, but such were the challenges of operating in Etrian's frigid methane atmosphere that each flight of three required human over sight. The robots' wetware were not up to the task alone.
Incredibly, there wer
e things alive down there, and they did not like visitors.
Cawl's view shook as the automata encountered the upper layers of Trisolian A-2's atmosphere Flight smoothed out a little as they penetrated the upper cloud layers and plunged down deeper through counter-rotating strata of gas. As they reached their destination some hundred kilometres within, the feed smoothed further, finally settling into crisp sharpness as Cawl activated the system's delicate image stabilisers. Icons flicked on his displays. Minor tocsins rang. The environment stressed the machines. Such small shrieks of alarm were normal.
Thirty Vultarax stratos-automata spread out into a polyhedral protection configuration. Cawl, whose machines were in the uppermost part of the formation, jinked his flight aside. The scows dropped through the gap into the protective cordon, spread out, and made ready to begin resource gathering. Cawl swerved his automata back into position. His upgraded intelligence core gave him a seven per cent efficiency gain over his fellow cloud riders. He reined in his desire to show off. That sort of thing could get him caught.
The operation followed the pattern it did every day. The scows took up a formation designed to maximise resource extraction. The thick atmosphere glowed with ionisation as the collectors' magnetic arrays activated. Trailing coronal discharge from their static bleed fins, the scows began their work.
Cawl looked out over the boiling clouds. In some places vortexes carved wells several hundred kilometres deep, and he peered towards the planet's busy heart down throats of twisting gases lined with veins of lightning. His machines would bounce and judder violently as they passed over these holes, but their images remained eerily still, their automatic adjustment a blessing of man's technological wisdom. Every stratum of the atmosphere crackled with light conjured from friction. Wet snows of frozen ethane and methane slapped against the drones' armoured carapaces. Exotic lightning forms danced like live things upon the cloud tops. The display delighted Cawl. And yet the true glories were down in the gas giant's unobtainable centre, where massive pressure compressed methane into bizarre super ices, and the freezing temperatures of the upper levels escalated at a geometric rate to levels greater than those on the surfaces of stars.
Men weren't meant to exist in such a place, but there they were. Cawl was proud of that. Such things mankind had achieved. Such things he might achieve again.
During these periods of quiet, the automata could perform most of their duties without intervention. Cawl kept half an eye on what they were doing. He was not particularly interested in the holy study of robotics. It was fascinating, but his passion remained for bioengineering. Still, he had much to learn from the Legio Cybernetica and their grasp of the artificial mind. He could not ignore any facet of the Ars Mechanica if he were to achieve his ambitions of complete technological mastery.
Knowledge was all he craved. Cawl's lack of patience for politics and position was already becoming known. The amount of time he had left before he had to stop changing role was running out. He wondered what he should do next. Perhaps now was the time to apply himself fully to the role of biologian. Once he had accrued a little power and a little status in that sub-cult, he could recommence his wider-ranging exploration of science. That was permitted.
His wandering thoughts were abruptly refocused by an alarm chime.
An auspex grid showed several hundred small dots converging on the extractors' position. They moved quickly, in straight lines against the wind, coming obliquely at the flotilla from the rear.
canted the domina.
Screed informed Cawl of a request from the Acquisitor Provost sent wordlessly to Aspertia Sigma-Sigma.
Status inquiry. There's a lot of them today. Shall we turn back?
Negative, read the domina's reply.
Cawl jinked his maniple of automata to close up the gap as nine robots left the formation and headed for the rear. The area of protection around the extractors shrunk by twenty per cent.
The Vultaraxes, sensoria could not rotate backwards, and so Cawl could not see what happened behind the formation. But the sound of autocannon fire carried over the wind to the machines' audio sensors.
A shrieking alarm from a nearby flight desk, quickly silenced, signified the loss of the first automaton. Lesser alarms spoke of heavy damage to two more.
A second alarm alerted the centre to a second death. Then a third. 'They're breaking through!' One of Cawl's colleagues broke protocol and spoke aloud.
'Three units destroyed! You will pay for their loss,' snarled Aspertia back. 'Maniples six and two, reinforce.'
Cawl grinned. Two was his maniple. He was one of Aspertia's best. He knew she wouldn't be able to keep him away from the action for long, no matter how angry she was with him.
The units under Cawl's command swooped out of the defence box at his urging, falling into a close arrow formation. They moved with perfect synchronicity, only a few metres apart. On his displays, icons flashed indicating where Aspertia wanted him to go, but Cawl had read the situation and was already on his way.
The shoal of xenotic lifeforms was ahead.
A gaseous bladder was their principle feature. The density of the atmosphere allowed a certain extravagance of form; these were not diaphanous creatures, but solid, well-armoured hunters.
Stable dathrates armoured the upper surfaces of the flight bladder and the multiple-jointed legs that trailed behind it. Underneath all that was a sagging mouth and several boneless nozzles that projected gas in a high-velocity stream, allowing the creatures to control their motion with remarkable efficiency. They surged about like darting birds even in the thousand-kilometre-an-hour winds of the planet.
Nobody knew what the things were, if they were intelligent or simply animals, or if they were native or alien to the world. The forge world's xeno-genetors itched to get hold of a specimen, but it had so far proved difficult. After they were killed most fell into the raging turmoil of the planet's interior. The rare specimens snagged by the scows had disintegrated during transit back to the stations. Their clathrate armour was hard enough to deflect autocannon rounds, but after death it destabilised rapidly, and the soft tissues quickly followed. They had no utility to the Imperium, so studying them was not a priority, and of interest only to xenos-obsessed eccentrics. The effort to gather a specimen distracted from the cloud mining. All the Trisolian Mechanicum required of the xenos was that they stay away or have the grace to die quickly, and so the xeno-genetors remained in ignorance of their mysteries.
The cloud creatures were far more nimble than the robots, and swiped at them with limbs that were brutal in defiance of their delicacy. Unit One of Maniple Nine lost a fan pod, and though its shepherd overrode its innate programming, took direct control and fired off the machine's void engines in an attempt to stabilise it, it went into a spin and plummeted into the roiling clouds.
Cawl watched his robots carefully as they drew firing lines on the nearest clutch of the xenos. Autocannon fire flaring with phosphor traced lines across the sky. The machines' limited brains could follow these ranging markers easily, and missiles quickly followed.
A creature rocked under the impact of Cawl's assault. Clathrate armour collapsed. A missile pierced soft flesh beneath and passed out of the other side before detonating in the air. The creature was mortally wounded and lost altitude, leaking a stream of bright gas from its breached shell.
'Do not allow them within the cordon,' said the domina in her multiple tongues. 'Plug the gap, hold the line.'
Cawl broke off his automata and swung them around before they got too close to the creatures. One of them lunged out from the swarm, a serrated blade on the end of its limb slicing down at his lead machine Cawl saw it coming, and made the robot dodge
aside with a burst from its manoeuvring thrusters. At that distance, it took half a second for his commands to reach the machines. That was far too much lag. The creature's weapon missed his device by mere inches, then he was past. He got a quick view of the magnitude of the swarm. Thousands floated from the deeps, their crystalline armour glinting in the endless lightning.
'I recommend an immediate withdrawal,' Cawl stated, data-pulsing a pict capture of the rising swarm to his mistress. 'See what ascends, domina.'
Aspertia spared a picosecond of consideration. During that brief time she appraised the tactical situation herself, and performed an analysis of the extractors' progress.
Cawl once again intruded himself into the robots, boosting them back towards the fight. The situation was worsening by the second. Thousands of the creatures were attacking, picking off the extractors' defenders, getting closer to the larger machines pillaging their domain. Cawl had his maniple concentrate fire on the largest of the creatures, a monster fifty metres across. His autocannon shots blew chunks out of its armour. Multiple missile impacts detonated across its upper side. It was still advancing on the scows as he turned his robots again, and flew them to a safe distance. The Mechanicum didn't even know why these things swarmed the extractors. They didn't seem capable of eating either flesh or metal. It could have been purely territorial, of course. It didn't matter. They had to die.
Cawl sifted through the mass of data exloaded by his charges. The extractors were at seventy-four per cent capacity. Every dead automaton meant that number had to be higher. Battle was a game of economics; cut and run now, and they would be in resource deficit, but staying to even it up might worsen their losses.
Cawl was about to swing around for another pass when his forward augur display lit up with dozens of new contacts.