Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  The graveyard was all these things and more, murder-spikes leaning this way and that, scissor-limbs lying at drunken dead angles, filament-whips ready to shiver back into life and cut one last piece of Imperial flesh off an unwary labourer. The graveyard was a monument to Asphodel’s death-dealing engines, and to the death the Legio Tempesta had dealt out to them in turn. To the Imperial Guard the graveyard was a way to pen up and be rid of the ghosts that rumbled through their nightmares. To the magi who’d come to Ashek II in the wake of the Imperial victory the graveyard was a challenge thrown in the face of the Mechanicus. To Galhoulin Tey, the graveyard was a riddle.

  The graveyard was…

  The skull dropped a dozen metres, suspensors sizzling as they braked and turned it.

  The graveyard was gunfire, and shouts, and screams, and running…

  XIII

  ‘Magos?’

  ‘This is certainly one of the chattercode’s repeater points,’ Tey said. He was looking up at a trio of Stalk-Tanks piled roughly against each other, their legs at half extension, the free space under their feet home to a tangle of pitted and broken debris from who knew where.

  (Somewhere in Tey’s systems a subprocess was cataloguing each fragment and mapping it to known machine patterns and other wrecks from his continual and subconscious scans of the graveyard around him. Tey liked to be the ‘who’ in ‘who knew where’.)

  ‘Magos?’

  ‘Observe where the top of the topmost tank canopy has been torn open,’ Tey said, pointing, and extending his pointing arm a metre or so to add emphasis. ‘For want of a better word, a nest has been made in the hollow. Someone set up a transceiver vane in that position. It corresponds exactly to your triangulations, Ajji. Confirmation? Opinion?’

  ‘Magos!’ Daprokk called again, in a threefold voice: vocalisation, binary cant and a jarring electromagnetic squeal on the alert frequency.

  ‘I doubt they’ll reach us, enginseer,’ Tey said without taking his gaze off the little camouflaged transmitter post. ‘And the odds of them being able to reach us and actually manage to harm any of us in any meaningful way are low enough that I judge wasting any more time on the matter to be, well, a waste. Look at the nest, please. Do you require the visual input from any of my bonded skulls?’ Two more of them were flitting about the top of the pile, raking it with scanner beams and feeding Tey a mosaic of the cleverly-hidden little codecaster post the dead Asheki had used.

  At this moment Daprokk’s interest wasn’t so much in the dead partisans as in the live ones. By now the sounds of the hunt were close enough to be audible even if he set his hearing to normal human sensitivity. The walls of wreckage all around them were baffling the sound, and the enginseer couldn’t be sure how fast it was moving towards them. Were they the objective? That humiliating commando raid into the graveyard had come so soon after Magos Tey had come to Ashek II; surely that was no coincidence? He cast a brief glance up to where the Headstone made a cave-ceiling of the sky, but even the hoped-for sensation of being in the protective embrace of the Machine-God failed to appear.

  Magos Tey hadn’t looked around. His odd little bonded servitor hadn’t twitched a muscle, just stood there bowlegged with the weight of its data-churn. How could Tey just ignore the fighting like this?

  Daprokk’s cortical boosts were not configured for military-level sense analysis or tactical breakdown. He had been sent here to supervise the ritual dismantling and rendering-down of the horde of wrecked woe machines littering the deserts and piled around the hammerstones. He had thought the war was over when he had come here. He wasn’t cut out for this. He felt a bitter stab of envy for Transmechanic Ajji, sitting at the heart of her manifold connection back in the ziggurat shrine, excused from having to tag along with Tey in person.

  ‘Confirmation, Magos Tey,’ she replied now through the manifold’s high bands. Both she and Tey were using encryptor routines that gave their transmissions an unpleasant burr in Daprokk’s senses, but there had been no question of communicating without such security until the mystery of four nights ago had been solved. The partisans’ raid had been planned with care, prepared with cunning and executed with skill and audacity, but it had still been a suicide mission that had cost them three capable leaders and two dozen fighters. All this, just to send out a meaningless chattercode between three wrecked war machines? Even ones as monumental as the Hammerstone Kings?

  There was more shooting from nearby, and Daprokk’s spinal gyros whirred – his equivalent of a flinch – as a solid-slug ricochet struck a high metallic note off some piece of debris far too close for comfort.

  ‘This is not made by enemy forces,’ Tey was saying. ‘None of the elements are consistent with what Asphodel designed for his own machines. It’s stolen Imperial equipment. Not even battlefield salvage. This is not a military pattern. Look at this.’ A share-point flicked out to Daprokk and Ajji through the manifold; grasping it, they saw a top-down view of a bulky shoulder-slung codecaster box wedged into one of the tank cockpits. It was bigger and cruder than Ajji’s elegant shrine-machines, but Tey was right. Definitely Imperial. They could all see, to their common disgust, the ugly scarring down the front of the casing where a bayonet had gouged out the etched-in Mechanicus scripture. The heavy moulding along the top of the box had been bashed and partly melted to break something off.

  A moment after Daprokk noticed this, a modification to the image came through: Tey had boxed the broken moulding into a red frame for emphasis, and imposed a quick sketch of what had been built onto the unit before the partisans had stolen it.

  ‘A golden aquila,’ the magos said, with a satisfaction that Daprokk entirely failed to share. ‘That tells us something.’

  Just then a ripple came through the manifold, a datacast with no exact organic parallel. An angry scream, an exultant shout, a red tinge across the vision, a roil of jittery, adrenaline-laced excitement through the belly and up the spine. The code-cry of a skitarius on its way to make war.

  XIV

  The servo-skull tilted its face towards the ground and dropped like a stone. Its aural sensors were crude, and couldn’t pick out the gunshots at this distance and over the noise of the wind. But its eyes were magnificent, made to the most demanding templates its home forge had possessed, and they had no trouble picking out the puffs of dust from running feet, the muzzle flashes, the flickers and smudges of infrared as las-rounds heated the air.

  The skull remanifested its suspensor field, slowing and skewing its fall to home in on the meeting of three winding trails through the piled war-scrap. A flicker of red and turquoise came pelting down one: the back-banner on a bounding skitarius. A stir and clatter in a nook between two shattered tank hulls, between the other two: its quarry, a man and woman who had wedged themselves into the gap and were sighting along their weapons at the incoming enemy. More were dotted back down the trail, corpses shrouded in grey rags and grey dust.

  The skull braked to a halt, face still pointed downward, and hung a dozen metres above the path. The skitarius, its organic torso and head a barrel of muscle wrapped in flak-weave, bounded up the path on backward-curving sprung-steel augmetic legs, a short but lethally heavy gladius-blade in each hand. Behind it a second Mechanicus warrior raised a short-barrelled grenade launcher on a scorpion-tail dorsal dendrite-arm and chugged a flash round over its companion’s head. The shot sent an automatic warning code into the local manifold and the skull flicked its optical sensitivity down for a moment as the blue-white nova went off beneath it.

  (And even so the flare was bright enough that one pile-and-pathway over, ten metres away, Galhoulin Tey murmured ‘my, those are powerful’ as he watched the flash through his servo-skull’s eyes, as his data-flows analysed the spectrum of the light and sent data-strings reeling past him of the grenade’s composition, its origin, the specifications of its launcher, links to tactical treatises on sensory weapons, profiles of skitarii famous for
close-quarter actions and more.)

  The lead skitarius had not broken stride: its eyes had flicked shut at the noetic warning and it had timed its lunge purely on the mental map it had made of its targets in the instant before the photon flare had gone off. It was good at its job. By the time the skull’s optical feed to Magos Tey had re-established itself it was showing the bodies of the two partisans jerking and bleeding out as their killer held them in the air, each with a combat blade driven through the sternum.

  The gesture was part barbaric theatre, part tactical move. The bodies soaked up most of the autogun burst from the third partisan, a slight little dark-haired man fetched up against the wall of scrap four metres away, and the flak-weave stopped the rest. The roaring skitarius flung its arms wide, flourishing its kills, filling the alleyway, the sight rooting the last gunman to the spot. He was cowering, sweating hands gripping the autogun he had not moved to reload, when a second grenade, a rocket-driven explosive round, hit home to finish the work.

  By the time the echoes of the explosion had died away the skull had embedded itself in the graveyard’s manifold and the features of both skitarii – one a bare human face, flushed and snarling, and the other a hide mask daubed with cog-and-hammer designs – turned up to look at it as it appeared in their machine-senses. They stared at it for a long hard moment before their recognition of a friend overrode their combat glanding, and each warrior gave it a curt salute before they both turned and bounded away.

  Tey’s servo-skull excised itself from the manifold again and began the climb back up to a high vantage, leaving its master and his ill humour still on the ground.

  XV

  ‘I should have been quicker,’ Tey vocalised aloud to Barrel, not particularly caring whether Daprokk overheard. ‘No cataclysm, for sure, but still. To be caught out by events like that. Graceless.’

  ‘Magos, I think that–’

  ‘Enginseer, I cannot conceive that you did not hear the end of the engagement. The particular set of trespassers at whose hands you thought you would meet such a terrible fate is all gone. I saw it happen. My word should be enough for you.’

  ‘Magos Tey–’ The words came simultaneously from Daprokk’s mouth-grille and from Transmechanic Ajji over the graveyard manifold.

  ‘One at a time, please.’ Tey abruptly turned and walked away along the trail between wreckage stacks. ‘Transmechanic, you first.’

  ‘The manifold accepted a servo-skull slaved to your own noetic presence, magos, additional to the two you informed me you were bringing with you. It has now deregistered itself again.’ A log extract of his drone’s brief official existence flared accusingly across Tey’s vision as Ajji passed it to him. ‘Magos, I am the shrine’s transmechanic and overseer of its manifold. I must, with all due deference to your own station, request that any first- to third-order device in your retinue which is to move through the manifold be made known to–’

  ‘Thank you, transmechanic, I understand your concerns and will not forget them. Enginseer Daprokk?’

  ‘We are going the wrong way, magos.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘That is to say, sir, that our direction of travel contradicts what I understood to be our purpose out here. If we are still here to examine conflict sites pertinent to the main partisan incursion targeting the Hammerstone Kings, the most important sites are now behind us. If our objectives have changed, I respectfully request the relevant data so that I may revise my own activity plans and continue to provide you with the best assistance of which I am capable.’ Daprokk finished this last almost on the run, hurrying to keep up with the plodding of Tey’s data-servitor. Tey’s own tall, slender form was just visible beyond, his muted russet robe and hood blending into the gloom of the Headstone’s shadow.

  ‘Commendably diplomatic of you, enginseer. My change of direction doesn’t make sense to you and you want to know what I think I’m doing.’ Tey framed this reply around a pict-burst: Daprokk’s reply laid out as though it were a coding exercise in a Mechanicus training hub, adorned with corrections and rephrasing by an instructor.

  Daprokk thought the magos found it funny. He himself didn’t see the humour, but duty and utility required that he go along.

  ‘As you wish to phrase it, magos. May I be informed about your immediate plans?’

  ‘Consider your map again, Daprokk.’

  Obediently the enginseer brought up the gridded and tagged map of the graveyard that he and Tey had been sharing. He noticed that a new red and blue data-pin had already appeared in it to mark where the two skitarii had killed the partisans just moments before. Daprokk wondered if there were any way at all to ask Tey how he could be so maddeningly unconcerned by it without breaching protocol.

  A series of points on the map flared green-white, Tey’s personal icon on each to show who was emphasising them. Looking around, Daprokk could see those icons hanging around him in the air as his mapping system imposed them on his regular vision.

  ‘Consider each of the sites we’ve visited this morning,’ Tey told him. The nest in the Stalk-Tank pile had been their fifth stop; each inspection had been of a clandestine transmission post that had assisted in the code linkup between the three Hammerstone Kings on the night of the raid.

  ‘Done, magos.’

  ‘No processing power at any of them,’ Tey said. ‘Relays, not code engines themselves. Their placement shows planning. Those nests weren’t just thrown together wherever they could find a spare spot. They were set up in advance by people who knew just where their transmissions were going to be directed. This will have been apparent to Transmechanic Ajji, whose order is steeped in the mysteries of code-speaking and far-ranged interface.’

  Ajji must surely have been listening, but she did not take the cue to reply. Daprokk suspected she was boycotting the conversation in retaliation to Tey’s own rudeness.

  ‘Consider the relay nest they hid in that enormous pile of tank-treads. That would have taken great labour to have set up for people using the basic equipment these traitor work crews were using. And that is not even considering that the whole exercise had to be done in secret, or disguised as part of their regular work, and carried out under scrutiny.’

  Under his scrutiny. Had any organic skin remained on Daprokk’s face it would have flushed. The work camp was run by Guard auxiliaries and the Missionaria, but the responsibility for the graveyard and its machines was his.

  ‘The same goes for the one that used the Skybreaker control cab. The nest itself was easy to conceal, but recall that they had to run in a power source and steal and then install several of the components for the transmitter. And we just saw another nest, positioned with equal care, but using a caster they stole from one of their Missionaria Galaxia overseers. Of the areas of incomplete data we now have on the establishment of these auxiliary relays, which is the largest?’

  The data snapshot that Tey shared across the manifold then was enough to overpower Daprokk for a moment, leave him stumbling stiff-legged as his processors maxed out trying to grip it and his organic brain became too fascinated to pay attention to where he was walking. It could be nothing other than a snippet of Tey’s own thought-logs, an incredible fractal web of signifiers and data-trails, blizzards of meaning and cross-referred information stretching through dimensions and layers that Daprokk’s brain, trained and re-engineered as it was, could not hope to follow. He wondered how many decades of work it had taken to rebuild the magos’s mind until it could function in the midst of all that. And he wondered if Tey had meant to pay him a compliment by assuming he could handle even that tiny breath of data, or if the magos had been showing off. That was another question he lacked the information to resolve.

  Daprokk realised he had walked into a Coffin-Worm’s leg struts and nearly fallen.

  ‘Keep up, please, enginseer,’ Tey called back to him in basic vocals. ‘If we want to know more about what the Asheki
work crews were up to, we should be talking to the people who ran them. We’re going to the worker compounds outside the boundary. No time like the present, is there?’

  XVI

  Most of the Adeptus had quartered themselves in the partly-rebuilt fortifications atop the Chillbreak hammerstone, but Jers Adalbrect had taken to heart his role as spiritual guide to the Asheki prison crews and set up the Missionaria Galaxia post inside the internment camp itself.

  Recent events had not been kind to it. Everything had been in order, Tey’s records told him, for months after the end of the engine war. The labour force of liberated Asheki civilians had kept the Emperor’s peace, attended their services, worked hard on ordering and stripping down the woe machines that were being dragged in from cold battlefields all over the continent to fill the ever-growing graveyard.

  Then the Ramosh Incalculate had arrived, and with it the rumour that some great tech-priest from out in the Imperium was going to dissect the Inheritor King, and it had turned out that the Heritor-corrupted machine-faith of the Asheki had not been as dead as the Missionaria curates had been boasting. There had been the secret nests and arms caches concealed deep in the maze of wrecks. There had been equipment breakages that with hindsight were looking more and more like camouflage for outright thefts, and a spike in lethal accidents on the crews that was looking similarly like the partisans had been carrying out blood sacrifices to their Kings.