by Dan Abnett
Tey had been conscious of the King clamouring to speak through the transmission channels he had gagged, a distant skittering buzz like a blowfly blundering back and forth inside cupped hands. Now he unlocked the most basic of its frequencies and allowed it to speak, to have something to help focus him as his thoughts started to ramble.
–You admit it! You have surrendered!– Tey’s restraints had robbed the King’s voice of its power. It was the voice of a comic villain in a street-player’s farce, shrill and tinny. –You confessed it! Bow! Bow to me! Bow and confess that my master is your master!–
Tey permitted himself the indulgence of a physical gesture, and shook his head.
‘I had expected better. You diminish yourself with an answer like that. The Heritor built you mighty enough that the sheer brute force of you compels respect. But in every other way? As a subject of study, I have your measure. As an adversary of the intellect, I have your measure. My understanding of you is complete. For curiosity’s sake, I give you a final moment to convince me otherwise.’
–Bow! Bow down and beg and die! I will watch while my maker-master ends you and y–
‘As you wish. We are done.’
With the turn of a thought, Tey reversed the gravitic clamps.
For one tiny breath of time the Inheritor King hung motionless in the arkosect bay. Then, as the ship around it continued to accelerate and the push from the inverted clamps meshed with the last traces of Ashek’s own gravitic pull, it began to sink into the void beneath it. Its vast metal shoulders went from filling the upper reaches of the bay to filling its centre, a space opening up above it. Then Tey was looking down on its prow and tower from above and in front, and then from above. Then, falling ever faster, the King’s tower slipped through the bottom of the bay and was gone. Now it was a rough black spearhead beneath the ship; now a dazzling line of silver against Ashek II’s brown face as it passed out of the Headstone’s shadow and into the sunlight. And then it was gone.
Galhoulin Tey watched the place where it had disappeared until his optics picked up the white-hot shockwave punching down through the atmosphere and then, when that had left too much interference in its own wake for him to follow, he merged his senses with the Ramosh Incalculate’s great auspex arrays and watched the impact ripple out across the Chillbreak Delta in the glare of the white-hot spark of plasma detonation at its centre.
He was still there, Barrel standing patiently behind him, looking down at the top of the dust cloud through the ship’s eyes when Master Mhorock Tobin came and found him.
XXXVII
‘I am the master of this ship,’ Tobin told him after a few minutes of silence, when he thought he had Tey’s full attention. The magos acknowledged the fact with a small inclination of his rust-red hood. ‘And I will know what happened here,’ Tobin went on after a minute more. ‘I think even you have to admit that I have that right.’
‘You do, sir. You do.’ Tey’s voice was soft. Inside his sleeves, his steel hands snicked against each other once and then were still. Tobin walked over and stood next to Tey and they looked back at Ashek together.
‘I know it wasn’t you,’ he said eventually, ‘that did that to my ship. It was that thing in the bay. So you don’t have to worry about convincing me otherwise. If I had thought it was you, or had happened with your collusion, you’d be dead now.’
‘Understood. Thank you, Shipmaster Tobin.’
There was another soft silence.
‘You’re normally quite conversational, magos,’ Tobin said eventually. ‘I thought my biggest problem when I came down to look for you was going to be getting you to shut up in time for me to get back to the bridge before it was time to go to warp.’
‘It would be days’ travel until that became an issue,’ Tey replied, and then caught himself. ‘Ah, your point is taken. How amusing.’
‘So, then,’ Tobin said. ‘I’ll give my word that we’re not being surveyed or recorded by myself or anything on this ship that I have power over, if that helps your humour any. But I will know what happened, magos. This ship is my command. It’s my domain. I cannot have… what happened here, and not know the reason why. I won’t have it. So do whatever counter-surveillance sweeps you want to do to check me, but–’
‘Your word is more than sufficient, thank you.’
‘Well then.’
‘I needed…’ Tey weighed up the best word. ‘I needed to turn the Inheritor King inside out. Nothing else would do for what I had to achieve here.’
‘And my arkosect bay couldn’t do that for you?’ An edge came into Tobin’s voice that Tey hadn’t heard before. ‘This is the ship that stripped and dismantled the Omnissiah’s Footfall after the Reyde-Jerreya Campaign, sir.’
‘I knew that,’ said Tey. And he did. A self-initiating retrieval routine had anticipated Tobin’s point a third of the way into his sentence and flipped the relevant dossier into Tey’s foremind. He dismissed it again with the flick of an irritated thought.
‘I spoke metaphorically,’ he went on. ‘I couldn’t return to the originators of my mission here and report to them with anything less than total understanding. For that, a certain level of risk was necessary. My apology for exposing you to that risk is utterly sincere, shipmaster. Had I any other way to be sure of my facts…’
‘I serve on a warship, Magos Tey,’ Tobin said when Tey paused a moment. ‘I understand risk in the pursuit of an objective. Ask that of me, my crew, we won’t bat an eye.’ He paused. ‘But you were the cause of an invasion of my sovereignty over my ship and myself. Asking me to forget that because of the risks of your mission is not a small thing.’
‘I understand,’ said Tey, and left it at that. After a moment, Tobin moved to go. Tey continued to stare down through the open bay floor at the orange-grey face of Ashek while the shipmaster stood half-turned, apparently in some conflict with himself, and then turned back.
‘So what was it?’
‘I beg your pardon, Master Tobin?’
‘The Inheritor King. The thing you brought on board. I thought our mission was pretty simple. Collect a piece of Archenemy heretech and take it to pieces. When we got to that graveyard things got… different. It obviously wasn’t what I took it to be. What was it?’
‘It was a blasphemy,’ Tey said, ‘a perversion of the human ability to imagine and engineer, put into the service of entropy.’ He was aware he was sermonising rather than explaining, but he found he didn’t care. There was too much to think about, too much to mourn now. He could hear his own voice continuing to speak to Tobin, talking about the stealing of secrets, the twisting of knowledge, the defiling of skill, and that was another thing to mourn, yet another essentially good soul that Tey had to lie to.
His thoughts drifted away from it, leaving his conversation with Tobin in the care of a semi-autonomous thought process that roamed alongside his apex mind, keeping a light touch on it but independent now. It receded from Tey and became just one high-level process among many: around it wove his sombre funeral prayers for Ajji and the others who had died in the graveyard of the woe machines, another thought-thread planning the account he would have to make to his peers of what he had done here, what he had encountered. He would not be required to lie to them, but he could not tell them the whole truth.
The sizzling red referent-rune that Gurzell had branded on his thoughts through the data inload was still there, still hanging in the centre of his mind, but now it had cooled to a simple dull grey, and it no longer repulsed the swarms of minor thought processes and association-chains that sped by and attached themselves to it. It seemed that the archmagos trusted Tey to do what he willed with the knowledge of what he had faced, now that the mission was over and the proximate threat had been removed. Tey supposed he should feel touched.
‘A shell within a shell within a shell, Galhoulin,’ came Gurzell’s voice in his memory, reproduced crystal-cl
ear. His processors had noticed him dwelling on the rune and had brought up some of the high-coded memories associated with it. ‘Three things we think it could be. If it’s a freakishly large piece of shaped metal, the way the initial reports told us, so be it. It’s dead, it was never alive, it’s nothing to us. If it’s tainted tech, Dark Mechanicus tech, then the old Slaydo was right. Which means we did the right thing too, and that’s the end of that. The third, though, that third chance. Well. Well.’
Tey brought up the vision to match the conversation. Gurzell was no longer an independent, mobile unit, the way Tey was, the way unmodified humans were. His nervous system was spread through a nanoscale augmetic lattice embedded in vivifying organic crystals set deep into the wall of the innermost shrine of a Mechanicus temple-ziggurat the size of an Asheki hive city. The archmagos’s consciousness was focused through the mechanical body he had worn when he was mobile, now permanently mounted high in the shrine wall and platinum-plated in place. It was purely a cosmetic touch. There were no eyelights or processors inside the brilliantly-polished face-mask that had once sat under Gurzell’s red-and-azure hood. Those impassive features would not move and focus on Tey when he stood on the floor before (and inside) Archmagos Gurzell and made his report.
It was what you feared, he would say. I wish it were otherwise, but it is what you feared. The Inheritor King was not made with warp-work, and it was not made with stolen Imperial tech-lore. There were no Mechanicus illuminata incorporated into its blueprints. No artefact of ours was reverse-engineered to create its shell, or its drives, or its weapons, or its intelligence.
And so Asphodel is what you feared, too, he would go on. He is no corrupted tech-priest. He is no Chaos-tainted thrall of the warp who has stolen our knowledge of the divine and made it profane. He simply… learned.
He is no normal man, Tey would say. And the Archenemy has its hooks in him, and perhaps he is on his way from being a man by now to being something other. But his works? His works are a man’s works. A gifted man’s works. A brilliant man’s works. Had he come to us, Asphodel could have been the greatest magos of our order since the golden days of Mars. A mind that could simply… learn… about the crafting of metals and the forging of engines, the writing of chattercode and the shaping of memory-wire, the processing of elements, the aerodynamics of ordnance, the structures of war-engines…
The warp mocked everything it touched. So even as human intellect aspired toward the divine, to know and understand and forge and remake and touch the intellect of the Machine-God, so was there a Chaotic mirror-image of that nobility, the urge to make entropy, twist logic and will, give material clothing to the warp’s ultimate, horrifying disorder. And no matter how terrible the face of tech-heresy was, the fact of it could be understood. There was an action, so there was reaction. There was a symmetry to it. It worked.
But the thought that a single, unimaginably brilliant brain could reach out and take the universe in hand, pull it apart with raw intelligence and ferocious logic – that was the nightmare. That was the unspeakable third possibility. That was the gauntlet thrown down to everything the Mechanicus believed, the dagger pointed at the heart of their whole way of ordering the cosmos. It was what Tey could not reveal to Tobin, what he had had to keep secret from Ajji even at the cost of letting her think him a heretic.
Thinking him a heretic.
The whole Crusade thought there had been tech-heresy on Ashek II. The sly communiqués from Slaydo and his commanders had been calculated, but Tey did not doubt that there had been genuine suspicion beneath them. And Gurzell, he had come to know as the secrecy-rune cooled and spilled even more new knowledge into him, Gurzell had allowed them to think it. Better the whole Munitorum thought Asphodel a renegade priest of the Mechanicus than that anyone brush up against even a hint that the Heritor had simply… learned.
There was nothing confected about Galhoulin Tey’s faith in his religion. He had embraced one of its profoundest understandings: that there was a symmetry to the universe, a balance of equal and opposite reactions, that as the noblest in humanity tried to build upon their reason and laboured to touch the divine intellect who understood the order of all things, there was an urge to twist and corrupt, an urge to overwhelm reason with malice and to let Chaos loose in the universe instead of working to create order.
What he had found on Ashek had rocked that faith to its core: hard proof of mighty works that owed nothing to either the golden lore of the Mechanicus or its mind-rotted warp-twin. Where Asphodel’s loyalties had ended up was immaterial. What mattered were the gifts he had brought to the service of those loyalties. He had not received religious instruction or divine inspiration to build. Asphodel had… just… learned.
His faith was rocked, but it was not diminished. Tey would pray to the Omnissiah for calm and clear thought, would make his obeisances and perform the rituals and meditations that would bring him as close as his imperfect mind could get to the divine intellect of his Machine-God. There was an answer to this. Perhaps an answer so esoteric that only the Machine-God itself had a mind to encompass it, but Tey would build his own mind however he could in hopes of understanding it. Really, to one of his faith, there was no other option.
And as he stood on the softly vibrating deck of the Ramosh Incalculate, his mind swooping between thought, prayer and memory like an eagle circling mountain peaks, Galhoulin Tey still found a little processor-space for curiosity, and asked himself:
I wonder where they’ll send me next?
For the 2013 Black Library Live! chapbook, Nik and I wrote back-to-back stories with a connective link. The chapbook was a limited edition of 750 copies, so we always intended to anthologise the stories for a broader readership. This seems like the ideal place to do that.
This is Nik’s story. It features the Iron Snakes and it revels in Imperial ritual and tradition. I could go on at some length about the incredible real-world slash historical reference she wove into it, but I won’t, because I don’t want to spoil her spell.
This is the most ‘ancient’ story in the book, in that it is set just over five hundred years before the start of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade…
Dan Abnett
The Fissure
Nik Vincent
I
Location: Formal Prime, Sabbat Worlds, 251.M41
Apothecary Utropius broke the seal on Basilion’s Corvus-pattern helm and lifted it free of his head. There was no rictus grin on the dead Space Marine’s face, no fear in his eyes, no shock, no horror, only a steely, calm determination; only penetrating focus and heroic self-sacrifice, only duty and intent.
Without a word, Utropius passed the helmet to Cleon, who lifted it to his face in both of his gauntleted hands, almost as if he were going to kiss it, before placing it under his left arm. He stared hard at Basilion’s face, looking for a sign that his battle-brother knew what he had accomplished before he was spent.
The Apothecary took his flask from his belt. It was an old example, worn by generations of Apothecaries before him. The flat, silver lozenge was dull and tarnished, and dented in several places, but the gold of the seams and stopper was still visible, as was the heavily worked silver and gold image of the Great Yorgos. He had been the first Iron Snake to be blessed with that name, and the engraving showed him wielding a magnificent harpoon, carried high above his shoulder like a javelin, bearing down on a vast, thrashing wyrm. The creature was spraying great golden plumes of water across the surface of the flask from its muscular flanks and tail, writhing frantically in the face of inevitable death.
Utropius unstoppered the flask, leaned over Basilion, and began to pour drops of Ithaka’s sacred water onto his forehead. He made the ritual signs with his right hand, and recited the sacred words that would lay his battle-brother’s soul to rest and commend him to the God-Emperor in whose service he had perished.
When it was done, Cleon turned to the sheer, smooth, burnished fac
e of the rockcrete wall directly behind them. He placed Basilion’s helmet on the ground next to his brother and took up his meltagun. Two minutes later there was a niche in the wall. It was smooth and symmetrical and about as perfect as it could be, and the Corvus-pattern helm that Basilion had worn as an Iron Snake fit snugly into it.
The first incantation complete, the Apothecary bound Basilion’s eyes and mouth so that he could neither see out nor drink in, as was the Iron Snakes’ custom, and then he went to work on his hand.
II
The penetrating beam of consuming blackness spread and sucked light out of the air and out of every surface.
The first the workers knew that anything was happening was when they were overtaken by darkness; not the usual inky lack of light, but something sinister, like the opposite of light rather than its absence.
Then there was the sound. The constant thrum and squeal of the drills and cutting tools reached a crescendo, and then seemed to die away, but the vibration they made, cutting rockcrete and plasteel, shaping, riveting and making seams went on, interminably, the various frequencies cutting across each other in ever-more disturbing wave patterns that made eardrums burst and vitreous humours tremble and turn opaque, crystallise and finally shatter.
Then something screamed. It was a low, rumbling scream, too low, too throaty, too loud to be human. It was distorted by the dark air that streamed through the fissure and into the half-built, below-ground structures that would form the base of the new hive district.
Core samples had been taken and examined, the ground had been excavated, piles had been driven and the foundations poured. There was going to be a bonus for the contract being completed ahead of schedule. There was pressure from the Administratum overseers and the Hive elders. Premium storage facilities and small-scale hab-units, single and double occupancy, were in short supply and high demand. The Imperium expected. Work was accelerated, shifts were doubled, checks were cursory at best, and corners were cut. Then the excavations exposed something.