Out of the chapel they fled, through one set of doors and then another, down a reliquary hall where two young acolytes gawped at them. Dyobann fixed grimly on the end of the hall where it met the two other main halls and became a tall cave in the rock beneath Augusteum. If he could make it to the ground level there were only three sets of doors to the plaza where the mech-carriage that Phrax money had bought him was waiting. Then, alone with two lightly-armed servitors in a whole world on which he had never set foot before today—
They reached the lift-car, with a junior priest riding in it. He made to say something and Dyobann ordered him out with a gesture; he made to argue and Dyobann flicked a curt, silent message to one of his servitors which snapped a stiletto out of one of its utility-arms and stepped forward. The blade punctured the priest’s skull five times in two seconds and then the car doors were closing behind him and they were on their way up to the surface.
—but he would get out, he would survive, so many years of travel with the Phrax flotilla had meant the one thing he had learned to do was survive. And here they were, the lift-car doors opening: Dyobann gave thanks that the shrine was not one of those that extended kilometres down. Had the lift ride been any longer it would have become a trap. They ran up a ramp and through the rear hall of the shrine’s central level. Could they fight their way out? He didn’t know, but maybe they wouldn’t have to. The circuits around the Helispex must be closed off from the rest of the shrine so the engine’s contemplations would not be sullied with the mundane data. It would take Sanja some time to realise what he was seeing, more time to disengage if he took the time to do it properly, then he would have to realise Dyobann was gone-Through the portal to the stairs, they were almost at the forechamber and then he would have to leave the chapel himself to reach a system from which he could raise the alarm. If Dyobann could just survive in the hive until the flotilla arrived, he could get a message to Trazelli and have—
He reached the inner forechamber doors just in time to see the great outer doors crash closed. As he cycled up the auxiliary photoreceptors built into his eyes to make the most of the dim light, Genetor-Magos Sanja’s voice boomed into him through his own ears and through every mechanical code-frequency he had open, boomed from the devices built into every wall of the chamber. The force of it nearly drove him to his knees.
“You dare?” the voice roared. Dyobann triggered neuroregulators inside his skull and shut down the fear impulse. Sanja was no mightier than he, he told himself. Sanja could not possibly have had to survive the things Dyobann had seen and done.
“You dare to bring this, this filth here? Into the place where our cult is in most abject service to the God of the Machine? This is how you serve Him?”
“…rve him?” There was a pale echo of Sanja’s voice coming from somewhere, but Dyobann didn’t have the time to pay it mind. He turned, looking around him at the soaring forechamber, the bronze pistons in silent motion around its walls, the ceremonial cogs hanging in gravity fields high overhead.
“Yes,” he called back. “Yes, this is how I serve. Do you understand, Sanja, do you have the first conception of what I have done for our order with the freedom that the charter gives me? The things I have seen? Found? The relics I have brought away? I have performed works for our high priests that no magos without that flotilla to support them could ever have performed? The pieces of tech I have carried through Imperial domains with never a report or a tithe? The sacred sites I have been able to direct our explorators to? The species I have been able to treat with out of sight of Imperial eyes? The enemies with whom the flotilla has given me the resources to deal?”
“So this is the Magos Dyobann,” came that shattering voice from the walls (“…gos Dyobann,” came that slurred echo). “A scavenger-rat in a red robe, a smuggler and thief? A murderer and a consorter with murderers? A friend of the xenos, the alien whose form mocks the pure genetics of the human template? One whose contempt for what is sacred leads him to poison a sacred engine of the Mechanicus with lies and betray the trust its keeper placed in him?” (“…in him?”)
“How could you understand, rattling through endless prayers in a sealed shrine, locked away in ignorance!” Dyobann was fired with anger now, barely aware of the magnitude of the insult in the word he had just used. “How do you dare to judge me?”
“Knowledge is holy,” bellowed Sanja, and now there were two organic voices joining in the flood of input from the walls. One was from Sanja’s own throat, and Dyobann whirled: the genetor-magos had appeared in the doors behind him, flanked by luminants and servitors.
“Knowledge is holy and information is holy. We live our lives in the quest for it. The purer the data, the purer the lifeblood of the Machine and the Machine God. Purity of data is the greatest sacrament a priest of the Machine God can hope for. And now you come here with this.” He raised a vial in one shaking hand.
“…here with this.” Dyobann realised with a shock that the echo was the voice of one of his own servitors, the one he had killed the priest with. It had half-turned to him, blood and machine-oil dripping off its blade arm, and was repeating every word of Sanja’s as the other magos spoke them. He’d found a way in, into its systems, had some override code that had bypassed the programs Dyobann thought he had embedded beyond all possibility of breaching. Without even a physical connection. Dyobann for the first time realised what a dangerous enemy he had just made.
“You falsified knowledge. You tampered with the data. You came here knowing that you yourself had created these impurities. You thought that you could deceive the Helispex Engine, may its spirit recover. You attempted trickery on the holy engine, attempted to use it to create untruth. An untruth which itself distorts knowledge and moves us away from the perfect knowledge of the Omnissiah. You tried to trick us!”
“…us,” the servitor finished. The delay in its speech was growing shorter as Sanja’s control over it tightened. There was no way to tell if he had found a way into the other one. Dyobann’s thoughts spun ever faster. “Your blasphemy against the Machine God is doubled and compounded.” Sanja went on, “and your betrayal of your holy office is nothing less than total. I strip you of your office and your name. You are forfeit.” The genetor-magos threw the vial down onto the stone floor, and as it shattered Dyobann spat a coded command at the bloody-handed servitor: “Tikk!” It was a word from the flotilla, the word for outsider, and the command was for the servitor to kill everyone present who was not of the flotilla. This was only the fourth time he had ever had to use the command, and the secret he was protecting here was probably the most terrible one he had ever kept.
In his heart Magos Dyobann knew that Sanja was right. He wondered if he had ever had a chance: those short minutes coupled into the data-stream had shown him the sight of the Helispex was clearer and more powerful than he had ever anticipated. But he was not going to stand here and let them cut him down.
Sanja had almost total control of the servitor, but the tikk command was buried somewhere he still had not reached. The servitor loped toward the magos before Sanja was able to halt it with a frown and a gesture, and while it swayed there Dyobann spun and wrenched off the other servitor’s tunic-shroud. The flesh-machine tensed as Dyobann brought it to combat-readiness and reached for the stubby cylinders around its waist. To all appearances they were part of the pneumatic mechanisms in its legs, but falsely so, a disguise.
Dyobann flicked back his sleeve as he heard Sanja’a own servitors clatter down the steps, and the round collar on the end of the thick roll of mechadendrites that had so revolted Petronas Phrax unclipped and clanged to the floor. Dyobann’s arm unplaited into a hydra-cluster of metal snakes that plunged and snapped into housings on the top of each cylinder. Loadout data, weapon specs and targeting reticules unfolded themselves across Dyobann’s mind and vision as he pulled the weapon modules free.
The servitor Sanja had controlled was spasming wildly: Sanja must have found its combat subroutines and was trying to
suppress them. But the genetor’s own weapons were just a few strides away now, three heavy servitors, cloned muscles reinforced by layers of exoskeleton, iron plates carved with the Machina Opus or leering gargoyle visages grafted to the front of their skulls where their faces had been. Chainfist blades rumbled and revved; a drillspike spun so fast it was just a blurred length of shining metal in the yellow light of the lamps.
Dyobann’s hydra-arm flared and writhed like an anemone and the first servitor was pitching forward, lifeless: one cylinder held a pressurised reservoir of a vicious nerve-toxin that Dyobann and D’Leste had brewed up two years before.
The second servitor hurdled the body straight into a tight-burst haywire pulse that blew out its cybernetics and sent it into a mad jerking dance. Its exoskeleton smoked and froze. The weapons in its limbs accelerated past their tolerances and began to burn out.
Dyobann backpedalled, circling out and around the floor of the forechamber. The forest of tentacles sprouting from his shoulder snaked in the air, searching for the ruminants; another snapped forward and fired a chaff-pellet into the doorway where Sanja stood. There was a tiny crack as it exploded and then the doorway was full of metal-dust, heated by a tiny melta-charge and throwing out magnetic static. The sentry-servitors built into the pillars on either side of the door had been shut down as a mark of respect for Dyobann’s position, something that Sanja was probably bitterly regretting now. And now, even if he reactivated them they would be blind and useless.
The third of Sanja’s killing machines was grappling with Dyobann’s own, and there was no time to shout out the codes: he had to use his tight-beam coder and gamble that Sanja would not detect the frequency and override it. Dyobann flicked his perceptions across the beam-link and was looking through his servitors’ eyes. His vision split, the shrine-servitor doubling on itself, filling his vision as it rushed straight at him at the same time as he watched it barrel toward his servitor from four metres away.
Then his vision took a strange half-lurch, disorienting him even with the compensators built into his senses, as his commands pitched his servitor over on its side. In the second it took Sanja’s machine to adjust, Dyobann’s servitor had hamstrung it with a low sweep of a wire-fine blade that slipped out of a finger. A homing-dart flew from the tip of one of Dyobann’s outthrust tentacles—it hung motionless in the air for a split second before it lunged forward. For a moment a third layer appeared in Dyobann’s already doubled vision: the sight of the gap between the servitor’s face and shoulder plates growing wider and wider as he guided the dart home. His vision flashed white, then dropped to black, and he snapped the connection back from his servitor as his dart—its outer layer of microflechettes, inner core of pyro-acid—burst deep in the last enemy’s abdomen. Smoke and the stink of evaporating flesh shrouded the wreck of the servitor as it fell.
And then just silence, but for a low hoarse sound that Dyobann realised was his own breathing. He muttered a verbal command and his servitor clambered to its feet and loped towards the doors. Dyobann backed after it, fixing every mechanical sense he had on the thinning chaff-cloud between the door-pillars. Runes danced in his vision to show that a second homing-dart was armed and ready, that the neurotoxin reservoir was still at eighty-seven per cent capacity, that the tentacles tipped with diamond-claws and tiny sawblade arrays were running at combat revs.
There was a crackle behind him as the powered spurs built into his servitor’s forearms and wrists snapped into operation and charged up the destructive energy-fields that sheathed their blades. If they gave him even sixty seconds for the servitor to work on the shrine doors they would…
Red figures poured out into the forechamber, moving with quick, deadly precision. Their flak-gowns and cowls were a dark, dusty red and bronze augmetics glinted and flashed where their garments did not cover: Skitarii.
Tech-guard. Not servitors but the elite military of the Cult of the Machine.
Three of them threw short, slender carbines to their shoulders and banged off quick bursts that broke against the subcutaneous flex-plates that armoured Dyobann’s torso and against the servitor’s back as it hacked at the doors. The renegade magos experienced a flash of hope: they were using lightweight shatter-rounds, slugs whose breakable design could not damage the forechamber but which also robbed them of stopping power against the armoured bodies of Dyobann and his servitor.
Regaining his balance, Dyobann lunged forward to bring the two nearest Skitarii in range of the one-shot microflamer in another tentacle-tip, but the burst of white-hot vapour only splashed across the front of their gowns. Both men dived and rolled to efficiently snuff the flames, one of them firing another burst at Dyobann as he came up onto one knee. The magos errant spent a second, precious homing-dart to crumple the man’s head like a gourd and flung another chaff-pellet at his feet. That was when he realised that the complex web of transmitted data dancing and tickling in one sector of his vision and in the back of his head had gone, gone at the same moment as the sounds of bladework behind him had ceased. He suddenly realised why the shots from the Skitarii had died away, why they had not thrown grenades.
Magos Dyobann spun around, the tentacles of his hydra-arm thrashing the air for a target, his non-modified hand hooked into a claw, his transponder augmetics bellowing defiance on every frequency. Even the data tendril at the corner of his eye was extended and sniffing the air.
In a flash of gold and a glimmer of bone, the two ruminants whipped up and away from the servitor they had just killed. They had flown into the forechamber high over his head, hidden by the hanging cogwheels. Dyobann snapped out the tentacle that held the haywire grenades…
…but the luminants were angels of the Machine, made from components engineered to the purest of tolerances and the skulls of the most pious of the Mechanicus priesthood—dare he strike them down with such a terrible weapon?
The hesitation wrought by that last scrap of his old piety undid him. By the time the haywire detonated over the prone servitor the luminants had arced up four metres in the air and swooped smoothly down again. One jinked to the left, and even with Dyobann’s vision guiding it the third homing-dart could not turn in time to follow it and it flew on to spend itself somewhere in the darkness high overhead. The other luminant corkscrewed and rolled in the air. Dyobann’s claw-tentacle snapped on air and skated by a millimetre away from its gold-leaf skin.
There was noise in Dyobann’s ears, noise that hit the translator augmetics and unfolded into data: the luminants were broadcasting a simple packet of code, over and over, three times a second: nothing more than the data-seal of Genetor-Magos Cynez Sanja, so that Dyobann would know who was watching through their eyes as they delivered sentence. As one of them extended mechadendrites whose adamantine tips drove through the magos errant’s armour like paper and hoisted him onto his toes, the other extruded a humming power-pack from the base of its skull. The code changed, sending a high-speed data signal on every auditory and vox channel Dyobann possessed.
The communication fed itself directly through his translator layers into his brain, so the message in all its detail unfolded in his consciousness in an instant. The message was not complex. A list of charges and four declarations. Accusation, condemnation, excommunication, destruction.
One point eight four seconds after the transmission completed, the second luminant clamped Dyobann’s eye-tendril between the thick grips on the end of its power pack. There was barely time for pain: the power-pulse coursed through the tendril and through the webs of micro-augmetic filament spread through the magos’ cerebellum, flashing them to white heat and incinerating Dyobann’s stunned, disbelieving brain.
CHAPTER TEN
Ready-room atrium aboard the
flotilla flagship Bassaan,
En route to Galata, Hydraphur system
Galt rarely felt comfortable aboard the Bassaan. He was acutely aware of how firmly his role on the flotilla placed him aboard the Callyac’s Promise, where shipboard routine
emphasised an unhurried pace, comfort and tranquillity. The Bassaan, businesslike and functional, run by a curt, quasi-military crew, made him uneasy.
And that was on the better trips. With Hoyyon himself a step and a half ahead, he was always ready to serve as he watched the old man’s gaze sweep back and forth and the crew blanch as though his face were a searchlight, painfully fierce.
If I could go back there, he thought, see that contented Gait and talk to him, I wonder what he would think of what I would tell him? I wonder what the old Gait would think of the reason I’m here now?
He watched the officers file past him down the corridor, reflections dancing across the engraved metal walls, checking their dress uniforms and fiddling with their hands. It seemed to take longer than it should—there were only half a dozen or so of them. He and Behaya had put their foot down about that: no more than a small group, and making even that concession to the travesty of an heir-apparent had driven home to both of them how bad their predicament was getting.
D’Leste stood further down the corridor, shuffling his feet fretfully. He and Gait had not spoken since Dyobann had flown on ahead to Hydraphur, and as days had passed and they had both become sure the magos would not return they had taken to avoiding each other. The flotilla meetings in the speaking chamber had given way to bitter, whispered little conferences between the masters two or three at a time in secret places. Rumours and uncertainty were spreading through all the crews. Gait wasn’t surprised. A tikk could have come on board now and known straight away that something was wrong, it was that bad.
The doors to the room swung shut behind the last of the officers and Gait exhaled. They had commandeered a room near the apothecarion, near enough to get Petronas onto life support very quickly if he took a turn for the worse. What nobody was admitting was that they were nearing the point where it might not help. Dyobann was gone and D’Leste’s attempts to keep Petronas stable without the magos’ help had been increasingly ham-handed. Zanti and Trazelli had already promised the doctor to his face that if Petronas didn’t last until the hearing they would take it out on his hide.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 16