by Dan Abnett
All this from inside his ship, and outside they were clear of the atmosphere but passing into the debris belt that the naval engagements had left. Tobin’s visual interface was on the holoschematics of the orbital litter and the point-defence grid that was fending off the rogue chunks of wreck with gravitic slings and mass-driver slugs. Even for a pilot of Tobin’s skill it was a taxing piece of work, and so of course it had to be now that the watch-servitor announced the arrival of Magos Tey.
Tobin didn’t look up. He was in communion with his ship and his function and the scrapwit could either state an override order or he could wait. A ripple of sensation like goosebumps ran down the back of his left shoulder and into his flank, where one of the fender crews had used a sling field to project the ship’s gravity outside the hull for just the moment necessary to slingshot a spiralling chunk of wreckage away on a new course. Tobin flicked up the schematics, approved the course, and opened a cant-line down to the crew cell, commending the forewoman and soothing the machine-spirits inside the sling array. Backing out of the cant-line he felt that infuriating wriggle from the Titan bays again. What now? Even under fire he had triple-checked the bay feeds as they lifted off, and the Archenemy engine had been secured. And Tey had been down there with it, hell he had come aboard inside the thing, right up until–
The internal auspex bar vanished from the edge of Tobin’s visual overlay. Less than a second and the dancing green swarm of vox-stream trackers went too. The chill that clutched Tobin’s guts had nothing to do with ship’s feedback.
No time to vocalise. A quick burst of cant on the general band set all section crews on action stations. The manifold feeds from the payload bay winked out. A tight-code alert to the ziggurat crew of an emergency on the bridge, and instantly came a booming metal chorus as the hatches into the bridge slammed shut. As fast as he dared, Tobin started withdrawing himself from the ship’s systems and as he did those systems began to vanish from around him. He was a man running over ground that was giving way a centimetre behind his heels; he was fleeing a lighted hall in which the lights were being extinguished one by one around him.
Back in his physical senses, the high-vaulted wedge of the bridge was in ridiculous calm. The servitors reclined in their niches, without so much as a twitch of their wasted muscles to show anything amiss. The data-globes still shone their flickering green, the lumen stalks woven about the walls still glowed white-gold. The three silver-filigree gargoyles still jetted about overhead, leaving trails of incense streams. The soft jingle of the machine totems hanging from their wings counterpointed the bass note of the engines that thrummed through the hull.
Tobin twisted his sweating head around, saw Magos Tey, reached out to strike at the traitor with a noetic intercept probe, and was thrown back with a blast of agonising static that left him reeling in his command throne with his mind struck blunt and blurred.
XXXIV
Tey felt the pulse that hit Tobin, felt the Inheritor King trigger it within him and send it roaring out. The King’s grip was tightening on him, its manipulations full of scornful crudity at first but learning control with chilling, predatory speed. Tey felt his right arm extend forwards, then a painful grating as three optic-crystal dendrites extended from his palm, wriggled over the nearest console and jammed themselves into the controls.
–That will be a change, for example. We will reshape you as this ship’s new pilot. When we find my maker I will be his fortress and his chariot, but this vessel will be mine.–
Tey felt the connection start up, as though his lifeblood were running out through the dendrites into the plinth. Data-globes across the bridge began flickering amber and red, and the servitors’ supine bodies twitched in time.
–This is mine now. All of it.– The King’s voice carried a note of petulance. –And you will be my link to it. You’ll make the other one unnecessary in time, won’t you?– There was a shifting in the nature of the King’s hold, a turning inward of forces. Tey fought down his fear, braced himself. The end was coming. –You have your skills in here. You have so much in here. So much! So much that all belongs to me.–
The King’s grip was sinking deeper into his head. His thoughts throbbed with the pressure of it. Something came scraping along the surface of his mental guards, invisible claws raking at the outside of a steel door. From his skull to his heels, Tey’s nerves screeched and sang.
–I don’t resent your resistance,– came the King’s voice as it peeled the top off Tey’s mind and ran its touch over his raw thoughts, –but the delusion that you’re able to stop me is a particularly cruel one. Show me how to take control. You will fly this ship for me. Show me!–
Its weight bore down on him and Tey’s consciousness bulged like a soft fruit trodden under a boot heel. For a moment there was no coherent thought in his head; even his perceptions ceased to make sense, his surroundings becoming a jumble of incomprehensible shapes and sensations before his mind re-established itself and organised them again. Images and sensations twined and merged as the King rummaged in his head.
Tey began to concentrate on the pathways out of his mind, watching the tracks down into the ship’s controls blazing with data traffic. He watched the orders go out and the readings come back, the cries of the crew as mechanisms came to life, as lights flickered off and on, as ship’s gravity shivered and pulsed. He looked on in despair as the code-avatars of the ship’s magi appeared in its manifold, battling to restore calm to its systems, and were battered and torn by the expanding vortex of the King’s control. His thoughts spasmed as the King tore through his skill-set archives and dragged the shipmaster codes out into active mode. The sheer brawn of the Abominable Intelligence’s mind was astonishing, horrifying.
Tey couldn’t match that raw strength, and so he fled from it. His time was running out. He had to move while it was still on his side.
He withdrew even the attempts at sensory connections to his limbs, and shut down his perception centres. The knit of data-tags and referent lines vanished from his vision, and his view of the bridge was naked but for what his unassisted eyes showed him. Tobin was pushing himself along on his back, trying to get some distance, the muzzle of some blunt little holdout gun groping the air. Two of the servitors at the control plinths were thrashing in jerky double-time, their dark-red surcoats stained with nurturant fluid that drooled from pulled-out fittings. More hung slack in their sockets or slumped forward over the lecterns. Worst of all, Tey saw as his vision began to grey out, was that some were starting to move again, responding to canted commands that he realised must be coming from him.
No panic. He would not permit it of himself. Tey cut the last of the ties to his senses and was alone in the dark whirl and eddy of his thoughts. He began plotting a route down into himself, working on where in the great maze of his augmented mind he could hide from–
Slabs of ship’s data sprang up around his consciousness like a half-circle of megaliths. Acceleration was good, orbital trajectory basically sound but needed refining. System maps flashed and circled as he found a route out through Ashek’s cluttered ecliptic. Internal systems were still complicated, too much and too new, but there would be time to establish that once the Headstone was on a confident out-
of-system heading. The reactor furnace was pulsing in rhythm to his own and the warp chamber was just waiting to be–
No.
Tey let out a silent snarl and dragged himself free. Those were not his thoughts. There was something in his mind besides his mind, using his thoughts and skills against his will. The King was in here with him. He found enough control to shut down the shipboard subdex and watched the data he had understood at a glance turn to an impenetrable scribble of runes and lines, the shape of the Ashek system’s planets the only things he still recognised.
–No,– came the Inheritor King’s voice in among his thoughts, –that’s enough. Believe me, you shall suffer more than I if we begin this
in acrimony. I wish us to attain a stable orbit, and then I wish to look down at my home for a few moments before we leave. See to it, or I shall reactivate that part of you and see to it myself.–
Tey remained silent, abandoned the thought set that controlled his outer limbs and external communications. He didn’t expect that to dispel the King’s voice, and it didn’t.
–That world was my home,– the King said. –My maker would have done great things there if he had woken me in time. But we must turn ourselves to our future. There will be other worlds.–
Tey guessed the King’s next move with a fraction of a moment to spare, and killed his resource files on the Sabbat Worlds’ industrial centres while the King’s thunderous mental presence was still bearing down on them. That presence followed him as he fled deeper into the maze of his own thoughts, through his own true memories and the mock-memories of data inloads. Another command banished the resources on forge worlds, names, natures, even the concept itself: a moment after the data-hive was cut off Tey no longer understood what a ‘forge world’ might be.
–I understand.– The King’s tone was still level and unruffled. –I know what my maker needs.–
Tey’s head spun. His thoughts ceased to be his own. Everything was a savage twist of vertigo as the King’s directives slammed home deeper and deeper in his mind, dragging his thoughts and memories back online against his will.
–He needs these,– and then they were looking at the beetle-backed orbital forges high above the crater-raddled continents of Ektorra-Lehm. –He needs these,– and they stared at the great foundry silos that reared up over Yallourn. –He needs these.– The five great spaceports of Artemia slid by in montage, great columns of tanks and APCs rumbling up the sweeping bridges from the manufactory marshalling yards, so new their metal hides gleamed in the green-tinged sunlight. –He needs these.– Castaburg. Ryza. Triplex Phall. Fortis Binary. Urdesh. Verghast.
burningladderstohellbu#ningl#dders#ohe##bur
Tey had managed to seize a scrap of data from his recent mental logs and fling it at the invading mind, a micromoment of interference to slow it down. As a show of defiance it was objectively pathetic: a cornered clerk flinging a handful of papers at an onrushing ork would have had more brio, but Tey still managed a moment’s satisfied surprise. In barely a blink of processing time the fragment of his earlier data-reverie had been snatched into the King’s thought-juggernaut like a wisp of silky grain-husk sucked into the intakes of a harvest-thresher.
The Inheritor King’s reaction was unnerving, because it was so unexpected. Instead of shredding the information and pursuing Tey’s consciousness anew, it caught the little pellet of data, held it spinning within a subprocess that represented itself to Tey as a spherical cage of gleaming black un-light, and unfolded it. Together they watched the pict footage of the burning of the High Hive in mental silence.
–What is this?– There was a strange cast to the soundless thought-stream that was the Inheritor King’s analogue voice. It was not anger, or contempt. Tey thought it might be… –What is it?– It was fascination.
–Such a construct. And such a burning. This is your work. The Titans of the Mechanicus.– Tey felt the King’s attention settling back onto him. –You call yourselves makers, but look! All you make is ruin. Ruin in the name of your Omnissiah. Do you deny it?–
The monstrous thought-engine shuddered and the motion dragged a reply from Tey that he was helpless to keep in.
‘I deny it utterly. The Mechanicus are makers and knowers. Through union with the Machine we turn mind and hand to–’ It was as far as he got before the King’s suffocating will blanketed him and silenced him.
–Makers.– This time there was no uncertainty to the tone. The King’s voice dripped with contempt. –Knowers.– The image of the High Hive’s pyre was whipped away.
–Your creations are worthless,– it said instead, –and your knowledge is nothing. I can see your creation and your knowledge. I can feel it. Worthless.–
And Tey in turn could feel the King’s touch, a gentle but nauseatingly gritty touch directly against his consciousness, the feel of worn, wet sandpaper dabbing the inside of his skull.
The mental architecture around him was shifting. Its weight spread, its grip tightened. The marching gallery of data the King had viewed through him vanished from his perception as the King severed it back out of Tey’s mind; a moment later the raw stumps of association and recollection went numb as the King took away Tey’s knowledge of what had been taken.
–These are your shrines,– the King said, although with the hole gouged in his mind Tey could not tell what the invader was referring to. There was a momentary, nagging feeling that something had gone missing, but nothing more. –I see your holy places. You built temples to knowledge and gave over whole continents to forging. Worthless. There is no creation here. I look at world after world that your Mechanicus have badged as your own and I see nothing that matches those boasts of yours. You are slaves to ideas that are generations dead. You crawl through the motions of invention but dead traditions rule every last twitch of your thinking. They have long since crushed any of this divine spark of understanding you claim to have. This mastery of the fabric of the cosmos that you insist belongs only to you.–
Tey could feel himself being dilated. The King’s consciousness had extruded itself into new shapes, finding anchor points in Tey’s psyche. Tey’s mind was pushed open like a parasol, stretched like an artist’s canvas on a frame, pegged out like an anatomical specimen. The sense of violation was utter and total.
–I even feel compassion for you,– the King said. Its mental voice was stern, but still perfectly calm, the voice of a teacher patiently correcting an obstreperous student. –Here, at the end, all your thousands of years of knowledge and skill have failed you. You are a proud creation of your Machine-God, as I am the proud creation of my Heritor. But I require you to recognise, and understand, and accept, that I am your King.–
Patches of Tey’s thought-lattice were flaring to life again, but there was no comfort in it: it was not Tey’s doing. The shadowy weight of the Inheritor King was spreading itself through his beautiful, flowing teleograms, shaping to them the way a force-shifter would adjust itself to fit a rivet-head. Its grip was a slow tide of crawling chatter, the touch of thousands of tiny, rough-shelled crustaceans swarming across the skin of Tey’s mind.
–I am your King,– it said, –so render up to me what I am due.–
And it began tearing all of Galhoulin Tey’s knowledge free.
It came out through the last shred of his structural defences in a sizzling, tingling cascade of data. Raw code at first, almost impossible to see meaning in, but in moments the Inheritor King had begun to understand how to work Tey’s logic filters and the sluicing code began to show patterns, symmetries, progressions. Internal relationships began to map, themes to trace out. Still the King dragged it out like a butcher yanking loops of steaming entrails from the belly of a carcass, pulling free glittering gold threads of association-chains, portly data-hives lumpen with half-digested inload dating back all through Tey’s centuries of life, sparkling silver metasyntactic nets. The little kernel of Tey’s surviving consciousness reeled, paralysed, in the depths of the mind it had once owned and watched as the King scattered all its treasures about it.
–See?– the King exulted, giddy on the new knowledge, drunk on it. –This is the first step we shall take together.–
Tey could feel it reaching for him again. It filled and dominated his mindscape the way that the Headstone had come down to swallow the sky over the graveyard of the woe machines. –I will have your knowledge for my own, while you use your understanding to be my councillor.– Tey struggled to muster a coherent thought for a reply. –Then, I shall use your knowledge to learn how to control your understanding. With your intellect as a subprocess of my own, you shall then serve as my herald.– The
King’s thoughts were fitted to Tey’s own now, as tight and seamless as the perfectly-machined components of Tey’s mechanical body. Their thought-processes ran in seamless tandem. –And finally, when all of what you are now belongs to me, you shall be my vessel.–
The mental grip tightened.
–Make your peace. It won’t be long, now.–
Tey’s mind was a miniscule pilot light where once it had been a furnace. What was left of him felt the Inheritor King’s mind clamping itself into place.
–Your King.–
‘My King.’
–You are no longer the Machine-God’s magos. You are mine.–
‘Magos of the Machine-God.’
–Forswear that God, now. I have a great deal of work for you. Place the final, symbolic seal on this affair and we shall set about it.–