by Dan Abnett
He focused back on the Heritor’s escape, and the pink tag faded down to grey and retreated from him. Now in front of him was a pict of the Crow-Hand, the monstrous spread-eagled creation the Heritor had ridden in from system to system. This was the triumphal image the battlefleet had selected as the header to its own Ashek dossier, Asphodel’s flagship reeling and listing under Imperial barrage, one of the last great victories in the reconquest. Its wounds bled plasma from its reactors, frozen air from its compartments, trails of debris from its disintegrating hull.
Ghosted in over the image was a tag leading to a spinning magenta rune denoting a classified data element. The intelligence had been firming by the week, and Tey thought it would not be long before it was verified. Asphodel had not gone down with his fortress. He hadn’t been aboard the Crow-Hand when it had finally shuddered apart under atmospheric entry and turned into hot metal meteor-rain over Ashek II’s south pole. He had slipped away from them somehow, left his grotesque orbital fortress and his great graveyard of woe machines behind.
(‘Are you looking forward to seeing the graveyard?’ Tey had asked Shipmaster Tobin, and the man’s reaction had been so strange that Tey had filed it away and kept it to analyse later, to see if he had made some sort of misstep. It would be inconvenient if discussion of the graveyard were a matter of some sort of sensitivity. After all, the graveyard was the reason they were here.)
His data began moving again, a cluster of amber tags swimming up to prominence, orbited by sparkling priority runes and Mechanicus classification seals. The core inloads for his mission here, the associative threads pre-formed, tightly braided into one another. It was meant to push his deliberations in certain directions, keep his thoughts pruned to what Archmagos Gurzell thought were the most productive tracks. Tey hated that, although after so many assignments the sentiment had abraded away to a tired, gnawing irritation. He’d worked with worse.
(‘Are you looking forward to seeing the graveyard?’ he had asked. The little scrap of recording from his own internal logs flitted through the flow and weave of information like the lone orphan at a dance, like a silkfly skittering from blossom to blossom looking for just the right bloom to attach to. Its passage left connection tags gleaming like silver dust on the other files it brushed against: Shipmaster Tobin’s personal dossiers, sealed and warded data-vaults on the woe machines, and other, more esoteric cross-references that chanced to mention graveyards or record strange conversational tics, directed by matching and testing algorithms operating so deep in Tey’s mind that he was not conscious of them running at all.)
The leading tiles whirled and settled into an undulating ridge like a sine-wave series, arranging themselves into a history of the Ashek engine war and then mobbing about as cross-references and tangents laced files together and then released them again. Now the burning of the High Hive anchored one end of the wave, the post-reclamation records making a gauzy flicker beyond it. The latter curve of the wave was made of a string of bronze and ruby icons showing the arrival of the Legio Tempesta and their engagements with Asphodel’s forces. Back along the crest was the string of Imperial defeats as the Asheki fifth columnists had declared open war, burned the southern hives and come north over the hotstone plains. Those markers glowed bilious green for Imperial defeat, but in the middle of them hung a bright white rune so hung about with cross-referent paths that it seemed to explode when Tey turned his attention to it. It was the marker for the Battle of Chillbreak Delta, where the Heritor’s machines had made their first serious breach in the Imperial fortification line, and where the Legio counter-attack a year later had finally turned the Archenemy’s retreat into rout.
Chillbreak Delta. The graveyard of the Hammerstone Kings.
IV
The command bridge was torn and blasted open to the evening air, but the codecaster console was intact. She gritted her teeth together against the pain from the las-scorch across her calf and kept working, hands moving back and forth over her code-key and power unit, checking the connections by touch. Checking, and checking again. The margin for error was zero. In minutes she might be dead; within the hour it was a certainty. There was no guessing how much of that time she might have to spend fighting the aquila-kissing scoundrels just to make sure her little machine stayed running. The connections had to be–
Her breathing hitched as the code-key lit up green. Kovind had been right, the Blighting King’s brain was still operational. It was reading the code, breeding it, unpacking and speaking to it. The green glow of the code-key began to mix with blue, and the double-coloured light gleamed in her eyes and teeth as she grinned. It was going to work. The Kings were talking.
V
The Hammerstone Kings.
When Tey spent a moment dwelling on the term, his data dissolved again and re-crystallised around the history of the name, making a shape like a long spiral seashell with shivers of data coming out of its folds like smoke.
Hammerstones was the Asheki word for the great mesa-islands that rose up out of the shifting silt deserts. Stable rock, fixed like an anvil you could bring a hammer down on. The mightiest of the Asheki forge-hives had all been built on hammerstone foundations, making a chain across the treacherous expanses of soft dry silt and radioactive hotstone dust. They were the capital hives for the great Imperial families, the homes of prestigious Mechanicus temples, hubs for Ashek’s mighty forges. The hammerstones were the heart of Ashek II’s intricate castes of machine-smiths and lay tech-adepts, and the fortified backbone of its defences against the Archenemy when the Sabbat Worlds had sunk into war.
Then the war came home to Ashek, and the Heritor Asphodel had built his four great Kings to break the hammerstone fortresses and make them his own.
A tile merged with another tile and the double-thick icon spun, rushed forward and suddenly Tey was jolting through the shallow gullies around Pitroost. He knew, because the ancillary data layer had instantly fed the context into his mind, that the Pitroost mesa and its blocky hive would be behind him if he turned to look, but he could not. He could see what the pict recorder on the transport had seen, nothing else.
It was after sunset, and twilight washed up from the western horizon. It mirrored the swarming points of light that crawled across the dim desert floor, and silhouetted the grotesquerie that loomed over them, glowering down upon its children. The Poison King, the first of the mega-engines to move north from Asphodel’s warworks. The wide round base was lost in the evening gloom, but the rest of the tower defaced the sunset with its sharp black outline, speckled with red and purple running lanterns and slender stablight beams waving to and fro. It tapered slightly towards the bulbous top where its cannon batteries and storm-gantries were housed – the proportions put Tey in mind of a forearm and hand, the fist gripping a grenade.
(That musing brought a whisper of cross-filed data, anatomical illustrations, armoury specifications, artworks and religious icons composed around a fist held aloft, but Tey did not shift his attention to them and after a moment where his subcognitive processes found no stronger correlations the crossfiles slid back down out of Tey’s active mind.)
A ripple of yellow-orange light flared across the front of the Poison King’s upper face, as if the wind had gusted across a dying ember for a moment and brought brief life to it. Each of those tiny glow-specks had been the firing-flash of one of the monstrous cannons Asphodel had designed especially to crown his first Hammerstone King. The pict-cam on the Guard transport hadn’t been good enough to see the shells as they arced through the air towards Pitroost’s walls, but his analytics knew the King’s capabilities and sketched in likely trajectories that curved elegantly across and vanished off the left side of the recording. A moment later the picture fuzzed and jumped, as Pitroost’s void shields discharged the impacts and the energy shunt leaked into the electromagnetic spectrum.
A moment after it cleared the field of vision swerved as the transport turned to try and
intercept an oncoming line of vehicles, the fast little fortification-busters that had become known as Nadzybar’s Fists. The turn carried the Poison King out of view, and Tey let the image go, shooing away a data-map of the fall of Pitroost before it could unfold. The footage had been recovered from the scattered wreck of the transport. The crew had never been found.
Tey was adrift in whirling data-tags again. He lingered for a split second on another image of the Poison King, a still pict from late in the siege of Ironhome where the King had come close enough to extend its gantries, gripping the side of the hive and cutting and drilling it open for the storm-crews to rush in. Ironhome had got off lightly. In its later battles the Poison King had simply belched toxic dust from its own internal forges into hive-breaches, killing the defenders and rendering tens of thousands of homes and street-halls tainted and sterile. Tey wondered if that had been at Asphodel’s orders, or whether it was the thought of the King’s own commander, whoever that had been.
But the Poison King’s improvised toxic arsenal had been primitive compared to its brother-machine. Tey pulled the name of the Blighting King forward and centre and watched the chains of data loop and reform.
Here was the Blighting King at the Ruinous Sixty-Twelve, a simple map reference for a point in the silt flats that had become infamous when the King had arrived to take its first harvest of Imperial lives. Its collar of rocket-tubes had been loaded with a foul mix of warheads: shrapnel bursts to shred the Guardsmen’s chem-hoods, blister agents to peel their skin, asphyxiants to wreck their breathing. The gas had settled into the valleys between the silt dunes… and when the Guard had begun to fall back and scramble away from the lethal fogs the Blighting King had ploughed up the desert with hyperbaric explosions that churned the poisons back into the air, now mixed with choking clouds of fine dust.
The Ruinous Sixty-Twelve fit Asphodel’s profile to the last detail. The Heritor did not just build war machines to fight. He built them for theatre. Built them for – Tey hated to use the word – grandeur.
Tey pondered that, his thoughts full of sour distaste as the life of the Blighting King paraded past. Its horrific advance up to Ashek Secunda’s north-west coasts was well documented. The Guard command had assembled as much visual data as they could as they grew more and more desperate to stop it, and the images flickered and layered around him now. The King turning the oases at Sainthaven to mud and steam with barrages of incendiaries. The King lowering its heavy armoured head like a bull about to charge, the rail-catapult that ran up the long slope of its back flashing as it launched Blight-Ball hardpoints and Helltalon fighter craft. The King facing off against Princeps Oskhai at the Eighth Conurbation after the Titan Legions had finally come to Ashek’s deliverance. Its bulk heaving as it manoeuvred through towers of black smoke, its back fractured, the Fidelian Squadron Reavers prowling around it looking to close, like skitarii stalking a wounded tank.
Under scrutiny, the outlines of the Titans sprouted haloes of annotations and referent leads. Tey latched onto one of the hard white spider-trails and followed it through the mosaic to the record cluster from the engine battles in the final months of the campaign. While the Poison King had held its own against the Legio Tempesta, the Blighting King had struggled against the experience and determination of the Titan Princeps who set out to hunt it. But Asphodel must have anticipated the start of a full engine war on Ashek, because every intelligence analysis Tey had at his disposal, including his own, suggested that by the time the Tempesta battlegroup had broken warp at Ashek the Treading King was already under construction.
VI
The Treading King’s head was high and angular, the inner walls of its command bridge sloped around over the beak-like void-shield relay that had thrust forward under the bridge windows before the monstrous rending-claw of the Warlord Titan Tyranova Primal had torn it away. That had ripped cabling conduits loose at the roots all the way up into the bridge and the codecaster access plugs were mutilated beyond repair. Kovind Shek had been ready for that. He had had to look up at the ugly crater in the King’s noble head every day he had slaved in the woe machine graveyard. The main caster array was almost intact and that was better than he had hoped for.
He could hear the gunfire beneath him as he wormed his way into the ruined cavity beneath the bridge and began his repairs, yanking pieces loose from surrounding dead machinery to switch in and wiring around the worst of the damage. Directing fine energy flows through control systems was one of the lesser mysteries, and Shek knew it well enough to do most of his work by touch. Working his way back up to the bridge feet-first along the crumpled conduit gave him more trouble than recabling the caster had.
His equipment was ready. He thought of pausing to mutter a benediction from the Four Intellects, or a prayer that the Heritor might hear, but the gunfire was getting closer. Instead he made the connections with the block of machinery he had brought up through the Treading King and watched as the marker flashed a brilliant blue. The circuit was complete. The chattercode was filling the synaptic paths of the three dead Kings. Soon it would spill into its final vessel and make a living one.
VII
A particular quirk of the Treading King’s design had caught Magos Tey’s attention. Something about the pivot of its thorax, the way the great outer armour plates distributed their weight around the turning joint that sat atop the thing’s powerful hindquarters. He watched it now in a sequence amalgamated from a dozen skitarii optical logs from the fighting around the Third Terraduct. The great glittering device turned this way and that in Ashek’s savage noonlight, reared up on its four hind legs like a centaur, now back onto one pair, head and shoulders over the blue and grey form of the Titan Sagitta Caeli. Waves of earth churned forward from the Reaver Titan’s feet as it tried to arrest forward momentum and abort the charge that had sent it lunging for the Treading King’s head. Its arms were already forward, cannon muzzles smoking, but before it could fire, the claws in the Treading King’s two middle limbs folded back and the giant melta cannons in its forearms obliterated the Reaver’s forward voids. The picture went white…
VIII
The graveyard guards were fighting hard, but they had been taken too much by surprise and the codecasters were all running now. The chattercodes interlocked, twined around each other and began to grow. To ramify. To evolve.
IX
…and reformed from another point of view, a wounded skitarius sprawled in the shadow of its ruined Chimera, doing what it could for the battle: feeding tactical footage and ranging data into the Legio’s battlefield manifold. The Treading King’s two enormous lead limbs were descending on Sagitta Caeli’s now-unshielded back, power fields shining blue-hot around one claw and vibration-drills extending from the other like talons, driving towards the missile pod on one grey-armoured shoulder.
It halted in midair. Tey had had his fill of Imperial deaths; he didn’t need to see the Treading King claim Sagitta Caeli for its tally. He magnified the view of that turning joint again, skated back through the record and watched again as it tilted back to meet the Reaver’s charge. Wireframes popped into view next to it: a similar joint that the Phaeze forge world had used for the Titans of the Legio Myrmidor before their forges were razed during the Age of Apostasy. That opened referent leads to more templates that began crowding the dataspace around the frozen Treading King: a spinal configuration from the short-lived Warlord variants of the Orreline Sector forges, a distributed-structure blueprint from the holy Cambyri Illuminata from the Phobos Cloisters, even a glowing red template superimage from some of the oldest, most secret designs of the First Legio, laid down before the Great Heresy.
Tey’s vision swarmed now, the Treading King almost lost beneath the layers of information as those layers wove their own web of relationships and generated new analyses. Tey let the image go, moving in among the lattices of connections and conclusions, occasionally reaching out with a thought to link records together or
guide one to a place in another analytical pattern. By now the original battle footage was blotted out by the references he had conjured, a thicket of off-white and yellow webs that–
No. Those code elements… were not his. They were as unwelcome as an ugly twist to a favourite memory, as jarring as hearing a beloved song sung off-key. They were interference patterns. Something from outside.
The visuals froze, became coarse-grained and drained of their colour, and fled from his vision along a dozen different trajectories, still sorting and arranging themselves as they vanished. There was the sensation of rising, and of lessening pressure, as though he were surfacing from deep water. Completely illusory, of course. He had not physically moved at all. Tey had encoded the sensations into his cerebral augmetics as a useful sensory cue to help him shift cognitive states.
Now he felt a rush, as though something large had just accelerated away from him. That was his reverie on the Hammerstone Kings, snap-frozen with its entire component thoughts ready for his conscious mind to pick them up again, pushed across the noetic link to Barrel as a single, self-contained matrix. It would sit in his companion’s data-coils until he called upon it. But now it was gone from his mind, his thoughts clear.
Tey sat a moment or two longer, riding on the mild euphoria that always came just after a process shunt, but he could not keep his mood from souring. He had brought one element of the reverie back into full consciousness with him: the ugly layered hash-grid pattern of the interference code that had batted across his mind while he meditated. Something was going on. As a matter of principle, he needed to know what it was.
Tey dismissed his visual overlays and looked at his cabin-mate with clear eyes. Barrel sat stolidly on the other sleeping slab, splayed pad-feet planted on the deck, head slightly canted forward. His hood was down and his eyes closed; had they been open he would have been looking distantly right through Tey’s solar plexus. The powerful data-churn for which Tey had nicknamed him bulged up from his back, making a dome behind his head. Its smooth dark-grey metal gleamed with bronze inlays and winking clusters of semi-precious stones.