Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  That dome held the suspended data-trance Tey had been running on the Hammerstone Kings. It was also considering the profile dossiers of the Adeptus staff involved in the collection of the vast woe machine graveyard in which Tey had taken up residence. It was also continuing the train of thought he had been toying with on escape routes the Heritor might have taken deeper into the Sabbat Worlds. It was also bringing up memories of the abortive engine war on Chellory two hundred years before Tey was born, looking for parallels to the hammerstone sieges. And a thousand other trains of thought besides, all waiting for Tey to fetch them back across the noetic link and load them into his primary consciousness again. They would be interlacing themselves, too, making cross-connections and finding patterns, ready for intuition and insight to crystallise around them.

  Tey was cataloguing them, seeing if any of his other thoughts had led to anything useful, when there was another blast of ugly chattercode and the off-white laceworks swam across his vision again. But no, not a repetition, an amplification. Backtracking through his sensory logs Tey realised that the code had not dropped off, just faded and then strengthened again.

  This was no code he recognised. Something was definitely wrong. A moment later Tey was standing at the cell door, Barrel rocking forward off the other bench and shuffling into position behind him.

  ‘What do you suppose?’ Tey asked. Barrel didn’t reply. He never did. The two of them stepped out of the seclusion-cell and into the bright clean light of the cloisters.

  X

  ‘Graveyard Shrine!’ The voice was tinny, oddly timbred. Without conscious direction Tey’s second- and third-line systems began combing the memory stacks in Barrel for sample recordings of similar distortions. The search readouts flickered at the left-hand edge of his vision. ‘This is Sarell, Adepta Sororitas Order of the Quill, to any Mechanicus personnel listening! We have reason to believe this insurgent raid is directed at the… Hammerstone Kings. R-Respond!’

  After a moment, the voice came again, an identical message. Tey sent a curt snap of machine-cant into the shrine manifold, and received Enginseer Daprokk’s response a moment later. The man was up at the top step of the little ziggurat, at the foot of the transmast mount.

  ‘Graveyard Shrine! This is Sarell, Adepta Sororitas Order of the Quill…’ The cross-check routines had taken a moment to check the transmission against itself, and it came up now to show Tey that the transmission patterns repeated. This Sister Sarell wasn’t repeating herself; the shrine’s vox-arrays were repeating it on a loop.

  ‘I have a timeline ready for you, magos,’ Daprokk said as Tey took a dozen delicate steps up the stair to the ziggurat’s peak. Barrel stayed below. Tey could almost have stepped off the top stair onto his shoulder. He looked down at his companion for a moment more, then out across the graveyard. At this hour it existed as a constellation of metal glints from the moonlight, smudged with orange-white wherever the crews had hung up a lamp. The hulks of the four Hammerstone Kings were dead black shapes against the starry, living darkness of the night air. The great slope of the Blighting King ramped up into the sky behind Daprokk, tilted and slumped in its middle from the superstructural damage that had killed it. The Poison King leaned drunken-dead in a dim tangle of scaffolding behind Tey. Off to their right the Treading King brooded, its gigantic arms stowed by its sides but still full of palpable weight and menace. The traces of light outlining its torn-apart face seemed to make it more sinister in the dark, not less.

  To their left, close enough to make Daprokk half-consciously tense his shoulder against its looming shape, the great back-raked prow of the Inheritor King made a tapering mountain against the stars.

  ‘That alert you’re looping. It’s not a translation of this, is it?’ Tey asked.

  ‘No, magos. It’s from the convoy that was bringing the Adeptus delegation in to meet you. Sister Sarell is one of their number. The carrier has kept its channel open. Ajji is using our manifold transceivers to track it satisfactorily, despite the chattercode interference.’

  ‘And have we responded?’

  ‘I understand from Marshal Orfyon that we will be ordering them to turn back to the graveyard perimeter until this… disturbance is dealt with.’

  Tey looked out over the graveyard again. He had inloaded and assimilated Daprokk’s timeline in less than a second. Now its markers and briefing points sprang into his vision as he turned his head again, as though the metal wreckage of the graveyard were sprouting a miracle orchard of glowing blue and orange trees.

  Exchange of fire… Last reported location of three escort guards/conjectured direction of intruders’ flight… Two intruders killed, convoy elements now holding… Pursuit waypoint alpha… theta… Adeptus representative [tentative tag ADALBRECT Jers] injured/immobilised, multiple intruder casualties… Breach to security in Treading King hull…

  In where the marker-trees were thickest Tey saw the little flashing rune that showed where the transmission had originated.

  ‘Is that wise?’ Tey kept his vocal cues calm, but the chattercode was scraping against his electronic senses, making him edgy. ‘According to your own information these people are armed and have given something of an account of themselves already against… Well, I know you’ve had trouble with Asheki partisans here already, so we can suppose they’re behind this too. They are the enemy of our enemy, quite apart from the fact that they were supposed to be our friends to begin with.’

  ‘A point of principle, magos,’ Daprokk declared, a little primly. ‘Everything that goes on here is the concern of the Machine. These others were here on sufferance to begin with. They have no right to insist–’

  ‘The integrity of our order and its mysteries is paramount,’ Tey agreed. He was rather impressed. Most of the time the enginseer seemed in awe of his august guest, if not actually frightened by him. This was the most forthright he had seen Daprokk since they had met.

  The night breeze brought a distant string of popping sounds, the unmistakable sound of autogun fire. Tey paused a moment to allow the noise and its implications to sink in.

  ‘That said,’ he went on, ‘I invite you to consider the threat to that integrity posed by the first set of intruders – the ones these Adeptus folk seem to be fighting against alongside our own guard,’ he returned the timeline inload to Daprokk, with his own layer of annotations showing his point, ‘might be our primary concern? The Adeptus are directing their efforts at these other intruders. The other intruders are directing their efforts at the most important machines we have in our custody.’

  He didn’t need to be more specific. He had extrapolated paths from each of the chains of skirmishes and pursuits, and added a crimson priority rune over where each of those paths seemed to point: three of the derelict Hammerstone Kings.

  ‘The Kings…’ Daprokk began.

  ‘The Kings are the raiders’ goals. Goals they seem to have reached.’ Tey had been assimilating vox-traffic into his timeline map. ‘And the Hammerstone Kings are the source of a chattercode we cannot yet decipher, which is blanketing our entire shrine and facility. Which, just between you and me and the Divine Intellect itself,’ he gestured to the four-metre Machina Opus insignia that hung from the transmast above them, ‘was sophisticated enough to leak into my thought-streams while I was in reverie. Take a moment to consider the facts if you wish, enginseer, but preferably no more than one.’ There was a sudden edge of ice in Tey’s tone. Daprokk was nervous again. Good.

  Before he could answer, the woman’s voice was on the broadcast vox again.

  ‘This is Sarell, Adepta Sororitas Order of the Quill, to any Mechanicus personnel listening! We have reason to believe this insurgent raid is directed at the… Hammerstone Kings. R-Respond!’

  ‘Be courteous and see if you can raise the good Sister, Daprokk,’ Tey said. ‘Indulge me, if you would be so kind. And consider yourself under direct orders if you would not.’ He pushed
his hood back a little, allowed his two emerald optics to stare into Daprokk’s four violet ones. He knew that seeing the full configuration would trigger an overlay in Daprokk’s vision that included Tey’s seal of office as a Magos Parallact. A blunt instrument, but Tey felt he had let this go on long enough. He thought he could hear gunfire again, from somewhere around the Poison King’s feet.

  ‘The graveyard is being invaded, Daprokk. When I find myself on the receiving end of an invasion, I consider it past the point of taking a stand on decorum. Go.’

  XI

  The chattercode had stopped its wax-and-waning and had settled into a constant muttering hiss at the extremity of Tey’s senses. The association strings spun away through his thoughts, even without

  the quasi-visual support of his data mosaics. It set him to thinking of the soft, deadly sounds of the corrodant snowfalls on Corenvast, as the metal canyons connecting the hives sizzled and tarnished. And of the gentle music that the solar wind had made in his electromagnetic hearing when he had walked out onto the airless rock of the Kheim III asteroid shrines to meditate. And the whispering prayer-wheels in the Mechanicus cloisters on Pirye-Semmaru, constantly broadcasting hosannas to the Machine-God across the airwaves, using secret and holy syntax principles that–

  Tey shouldn’t have been surprised that that train of thought triggered a physical twitch in his limbs and a crimson warning rune in his vision. Whatever this was, it was similar enough to Mechanicus works in his memory coils to trip the warnings that Archmagos Gurzell had built into his briefing inload.

  It was a fine thing when a man needed explicit permission to follow his own trains of thought, but Tey decided it was for the best a moment later, when the Adeptus delegation had arrived.

  There was a flash of bright blue-white floodlights that swept this way and that as the fat-wheeled carrier wove through the last of the graveyard’s debris piles and into the clearing around the ziggurat. It lit up the red of Daprokk’s robe as he walked towards the motley little group that was spilling out of the open hatch, kicked-up dust haloing their legs as they hurried forward. Tey, lingering on the lowest step of the ziggurat as Daprokk went forward to meet them, counted two Administratum clerks’ gowns, at least three Imperial Guard fatigues, the tunic of one of the bonded planetary reclamation guilds. And behind them–

  ‘Daprokk! Which one of you is Enginseer Daprokk?’

  The shout came from the taller of the two figures bringing up the rear. A woman in the livery of the Adepta Sororitas Order of the Quill – Sarell, Tey presumed – supported a lanky, lantern-jawed youngster with a clumsy tonsure and the long tunic of an ordained Missionaria Galaxia evangelist. Tey’s memory dossiers flipped the name Jers Adalbrect out for his foremind to catch, and followed it with a string of paramedical analysis: Adalbrect was carrying one shoulder and arm stiff and awkward, the body language of a fresh combat wound.

  Then Tey’s attention was snatched by the noise spilling out of the carrier’s open hatch. He spread his long metal arms, using aural pickups in his head, shoulders and hands to triangulate and focus on it. The sound was unmistakable: the carrier vox was tainted by the same wash of chattercode interference that had wormed its way into his own senses. He felt a crawling sensation through his limbs and back as the machinery of his body cycled up to amber-level readiness and heard the snicking sounds as a number of concealed defence systems reflexively armed themselves.

  ‘Our transmechanic is evaluating the signal according to the mysteries of her order,’ Daprokk was saying rather defensively, ‘which I shall not discuss. The signal is not considered to pose a threat to our installation, and certainly not to yourselves. Its relation to the insurgent action here tonight shall be evaluated. That action is being brought under control. There is no cause for impatience, Sister.’ Tey would have rolled his eyes, if his crystalline optic arrays had been built to allow the movement. ‘We may proceed to treat your wounded as a token of hospitality, our Order to yours.’

  There was shouting from below him, and then came something that made Tey sharpen his focus on the wounded, staring-eyed missionary.

  ‘The Kings are finding their voice,’ Adalbrect croaked. ‘It’s not just some… harmless thing. They’re doing something with the Kings.’

  Tey turned his senses up and out, tracking the ugly buzz through the manifold, and once he knew what to look for he could see it clearly. The chattercode was washing back and forth between the three wrecked Kings: Poison, Blighted, Treading. With every call and response it was growing denser, more complex. The corpses of the Hammerstone Kings were talking.

  ‘Can you guarantee that this transmission is so harmless that we can just let them make it?’ the Sister was half-shouting at Daprokk at the bottom of the stairs. ‘We don’t have the power or the skill to do this from the carrier, but you have these gantry antennae and a transmechanic. Enginseer, please. Will you consider what I have told you?’

  ‘Daprokk?’ Tey canted to him on a spectrum segment inaudible to the Adeptus voxes and the manifold overhead. ‘Utility directives over purity tenets, please. Pay attention to what they’re saying. Have Ajji shut down the interpretation work and jam the signal. I want it unintelligible. I want it scrambled to randomness and beyond. Swallow your damned pride and do it.’

  Daprokk didn’t move, didn’t take his gaze from the Sister and her reeling, half-fainting companion. But Tey heard/felt the flash of code from the enginseer’s spinal antenna out through the manifold, and a split-second later came Transmechanic Ajji’s response.

  Finally, he thought, and found himself turning to study the great dark spire of the Inheritor King, brooding over him and his little lighted graveyard from Ashek’s darkening sky.

  XII

  It was four days later, and the graveyard sat sullenly in deep daytime gloom.

  The Ramosh Incalculate was no longer a barely-perceptible dot high in the heavens, but a paralysing mass of metal and stone hanging motionless overhead. Mhorock Tobin had answered Tey’s summons and, fitting its action to its nickname, the Headstone had descended over the machine graveyard and made itself the sky.

  The cloud-rippled grey of the desert sky was gone. The giant lifter was all of it now, blotted it all out and cut off the pale glow of Ashek’s sun for all but the first and last hours of the day. Now that the ventral shutters had folded back and the great cavern of the arkosect bay was open over their heads it looked like a temple ceiling, high-arched and cross-vaulted, the interior arc lights winking like devotional lanterns. And then a moment of reflection, or a peripheral glimpse of something closer to hand, gave the sight perspective and let the Headstone hit the mind like a hammer. That spacious, vaulted temple was hanging one and a half kilometres overhead. Those elegant traceries just visible in its shadowed roof were gantries and lifters that could drag a Titan up from the ground by main force, and utility arrays that could shear it limb from limb. The high ceiling that looked like it arched over an incense-filled nave was really a space that could descend to touch the ground and barely notice that it had engulfed the entire cathedral, and could engulf half a dozen more.

  The ocular skull climbed up through the air towards that enormous space on a buzzing suspensor cushion, shuddering a little in the light atmospheric chop, the bright silver of its inlays and augmetics dulled by the Ramosh Incalculate’s shadow and the pervasive Ashek dust. When it was so high that it would have been less than a speck from the ground (and still less than a third of the way to the Headstone) it stopped, hung, and turned its polished and lacquered face back down to the graveyard.

  Somewhere down below in all that wreckage, Magos Tey’s body was walking on semi-automatic with Enginseer Daprokk trailing along behind. A not insignificant part of Magos Tey’s senses and consciousness had been directed through a secure tunnel in the manifold laid down by the Headstone, up into the skull, to try and take the place in.

  Galhoulin Tey had pursued his
rather strange vocation for the Adeptus Mechanicus for over a century, and he had never before seen a sight like the one he was seeing through the skull’s eyes. He might, Omnissiah willing, pursue it for another century or more, and even so he would be surprised if he saw anything like it again.

  The skull pivoted in mid-air, its optics ticking softly.

  The graveyard had none of the sober order that the word implied. It might pass for an insect swarm, or a carpet of ugly, runnelled, rust-coloured fungus, or a high view of one of the vast trash hills that accumulated around Imperial cities and at the bases of hives, but it beggared the comparisons Tey had tried to bring to mind for it. It was its own thing.

  It was fragments, and shells, and hulks, and wrecks, and scraps. There were kilometres-long tracts where woe machines had been laid out in orderly rows, their broken pieces stacked alongside them, and there were far more where they had just been dragged, dumped and left, crazy leaning mounds of metal shapes, stacks of steel piston-limbs, blown-off turrets piled in cairns like skulls outside an Arbites punitory, fragments and lengths of tank-track making lumpy hillocks among the lurching parade of wrecks. Little paths wriggled their way between the piles of dead metal, broad at the outside where new machine-corpses were still being brought in across the plains, but further in shrinking to tiny threads of bare dust with hardly room to squeeze between teetering piles of smashed war machines heaped three times as high as a person could reach.

  The graveyard was the segmented bodies of piston-driven Coffin-Worms lolling half-dislocated with their shattered cockpit canopies gaping. It was Flensing-Wheels leaning drunkenly against one another, pocked by las-fire and distorted by macro-shells or Titan kicks but the spikes on their sides still butcher-sharp. It was the obscene burred bodies of Gallowspiders slumped and lying amid stacks of their own shot-off legs. It was whole squadrons of batrachian Rackmouths crushed up shoulder to shoulder in death with the vicious squat shapes of the Murdernauts. It was ungainly piles of Blight-Balls, grotesque as rotting fruit, or Skybreaker carriages lying in broken lines like a snake crushed by a truck-wheel. The graveyard was the looming, leaning shapes of the four Hammerstone Kings. The monstrous shapes they cast against the sky could still chill the heart even now they were dead, gutted and in the shadow of the Headstone itself.