The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Within moments he was accelerating at a strained whine, the suspensors of his jetbike ululating in protest at the sudden speed. The rest of his squad followed, falling into effortless alignment through ease of habit. They were gone into the mist of the tunnel ahead within the span of a single breath.

  Commander Krole’s reply set the message beamer vibrating in Marei’s hand, against her palm. Receipt of Marei’s position and progress, and a warning to redouble her caution.

  But that had been an hour ago, when everyone was still alive.

  Marei moved through the mist alone, her blade held before in a traditional garde position, embodying the first form in the Principles of Alertness. She stalked rather than walked, careful that her passage wouldn’t disturb the golden fog. Elsewhere within the mist, impossible to know where, she heard the daemon growl. After that came a series of wet cracks and crunches. It was feeding again. If she came upon it now, she might have a chance.

  Though now was also her best chance to run.

  She found Varujan before long. One of Squad Ostianus’ warriors, she came upon his jetbike first, a clawed thing of tormented wreckage, the sleek eagles broken, the engine ripped apart. The Custodian lay not far from his vehicle, unbreathing, missing both legs and one of his arms. His breastplate and the body beneath was lost to ruination, and his guardian spear was snapped midway down the haft where it had sundered on impact at high speed.

  Leaving him untouched, she moved on. A shape loomed in the mist ahead, not a wall as she’d first thought but the fallen form of Ascraeus. She drew nearer to its cockpit, the great metal canine head crooked where its collapse had driven its chin into the ground. The Warhound’s eye windows were shattered, leaving the war machine’s corpse staring sightlessly out into the shrouded webway. Marei could make out the silhouette of one of the crew, slumped in a restraint throne.

  ‘Sister…’

  She moved closer still, drawn by the voice from the ruptured cockpit. Two of the crew were dead, bent and slouched at unnatural angles. The surviving steersman had removed his helm and stared towards her. Closer now, she could hear the shallow, swift rhythm of his breathing.

  ‘Which… which one are you?’ He spoke in a whisper, seemingly from shock and his wounds rather than tact.

  She signed her name with one hand and gestured for him to remain quiet.

  He didn’t obey. Both of his eyes were black with dilation. ‘Where is it? Where did it go? Help. Please. Help me, Sister.’

  Marei looked into the ruined, slanted cockpit. The steersman’s control panel had twisted in the impact, crushing his legs and trapping him in his throne. Leaning in, Marei saw his malformed shins and broken ankles wedged within the wreckage. The pain must have been immense. The fact he wasn’t screaming was either a testament to his resolve or to the depths of his shock.

  He was dead whether she freed him from the debris or not, and she couldn’t even do that without industrial cutting tools.

  ‘Sister,’ he said again, louder this time. Marei pressed a gloved finger to her lips, to no avail. ‘Help me,’ the steersman repeated. Elsewhere in the mist, she heard the daemon cease its feast and grunt, sniffing the air.

  ‘Sist–’ He spoke no more. The steersman stared at her for several trembling seconds, unable to do anything more than gurgle breathlessly around the blade lancing through his neck. Marei pulled her longsword free of his throat, letting him fall limp.

  The daemon moved nearby. She heard the creaking and crackling of its stretching limbs, smelt the rancid mammalian stink of its spread wings.

  She moved again, staying close to the downed Titan, drawing her incinerator pistol. The dead Warhound wasn’t silent; its internals still ticked and clicked as they cooled, its joints still gave infrequent creaks and scrapes as the machine settled into what would be its grave.

  It had struck Ascraeus first. With the Custodians still setting up a perimeter and the Sisters of the Fire Wyrms Cadre taking up defensive positions, a bolt of winged darkness had dropped from the featureless sky, landing atop the Warhound with an insane screech of claws tearing through consecrated metal. The plaintive whine of rent armour plating and the hammer-hiss of bursting pistons ringing through the mist had made the outcome clear even before the immense crash of the Titan’s collapse. Reactor-guts and spinal stanchions flew wide from the creature’s plunging talons, tumbling through the mist and resonating with metallic bangs as they spilled across the ground.

  Marei could scarcely see the thrashing creature’s outline. It seemed out of phase with human senses – there and not there. As much as it was harrowing its way through Ascraeus’ armour plating with great swings of its claws, its very presence seemed to rend corporeal matter apart, leaving reinforced ceramite and adamantium as fluid as protein mush.

  It took to the sky, kicking off from the toppling Warhound, and vanished once more into the gold.

  The next time it landed, it had started on the Sisters.

  Marei thumbed her pistol to a thin jet setting, intending to get close enough that a full spread of flame would be useless. As she reached the Warhound’s rear, ducking beneath one of the ungainly raised clawed feet, she heard the thrum of active power armour.

  Marei turned, sword aimed at Hyaric’s face. The steel point was a finger’s breadth from his nose. His stitched face was a mapwork of fresh bruising and blood spatters. His eyes, at least, were undamaged and clear. Judging by the damage to his gorget, the daemon had torn his helmet clean free when it had almost killed him.

  She lowered her blade and stared at him. She kept nothing from her expression. Relief, unease, her belief on where they should move – it was all present upon her features.

  He didn’t reply. He didn’t even acknowledge her meaning. That was how she knew.

  Sister and Custodian moved in the same moment, both blades coming up as if in reflection of one another. The Custodian thrust forwards with his spear, the Sister spun aside and parried the blade with an echoing cry of steel on steel.

  The creature wearing Hyaric’s corpse swung uselessly at her, the unpowered blade whistling through the air. Fury lit its dead eyes, the daemon enraged at its own sluggishness.

  Marei cracked the pommel of her blade into Hyaric’s face, shattering the already crooked nose with a snap. She was already moving away, twisting and spinning, levelling her pistol and disgorging a slick torrent of liquid flame.

  It wasn’t enough. The guardian spear pounded through her stomach and burst from her back, driving deep into the layered armour plating of the downed Warhound behind her. Her weapons fell from her hands, dropping into the mist.

  Pinned in place, Marei still struggled to pull herself forwards, dragging her impaled body along the spear’s haft, inch by agonising inch. Gutting herself for the chance to get free.

  Hyaric stood there, watching her with a loose jaw showing a spread of lengthening teeth.

  ‘Anathema’s Daughter,’ he said aloud, in a voice that was too wet and slack to be his own, the unformed tone of a child practising speech.

  Marei’s leeched strength would carry her no further. Blood ran hot and dark from her mouth, cascading in bitter torrents down her breastplate each time she tried to breathe. Weakening hands clutched at the message beamer at her belt, only for it to almost fall from nerveless fingers. She thumbed a brief code before dropping it, the messenger following her weapons down into the ground fog.

  Her last thought, as Hyaric stepped closer, was that she would still be alive when he started eating her. Fortunately, she was wrong.

  Ten

  The way home

  Archimandrite

  Mistress of the Black Fleet

  Hieronyma, that redoubtable archpriestess of the Ordo Reductor, didn’t scream even when they drilled out her eyes. She was a war-priestess of the Unmaker God, responsible for the nerve-stripping torture of countless thousands of prisoners an
d criminals, binding them into holy robotic shells through sacred rituals. Given her role and authority, she had deadened most of her nerves along with her conscience. It was simply the way of things.

  The procedure was never going to be painless. Having been responsible for much of the schematics that her reforging was operating from, she was well aware of the torment involved. Willingly she made the sacrifice, offering up her flesh for transmogrification and ascension. Her operator-surgeons expected her to show her pain; it had been calculated in the factors of reforging, which made her even more eager to show no reaction at all. She couldn’t stop the tics and twitches of dead nerves briefly rekindled to life, but she could at least prevent herself screaming aloud.

  She had done so with a minor and forgivable deception, however. Before the surgeries began, she had removed her vocal cords during her isolated preparations. The only sounds she could make at all were sighing, weakling huffs.

  She had to be awake for the process itself, so her neural activity could be carefully monitored. The physical implants were only a portion of her ascension. The mental implantation was of greater importance.

  Arkhan Land was present by virtue of expertise, if not by rank. At his side was Diocletian, the Custodian present by virtue of the fact no one had the authority to tell him to go anywhere else. They remained outside the surgery chamber, with Diocletian watching the operation taking place and Land watching the data-feeds flooding into Hieronyma’s mind.

  Seven monitors, each fed from separate cogitators, spilled reams of code across their flickering faces. Land stared, scratching his bald head, doing his very best to follow what he was seeing unfold. He had provided the schematics and references for the machinery necessary to cradle unequalled degrees of lore in a semi-biological brain. He had added recovered plans and schema from his personal collection to weaponise the tech-priestess beyond anything her ordo had seen before. It had been with a heavy heart he’d passed over the forbidden texts from his deepest excavations, but truth be told that weight came with no shortage of curiosity. If all went according to plan, those weapon systems would be instrumental in retaking Sacred Mars.

  Now all he could do was wait and see if Hieronyma survived.

  He doubted she would. Land was under no illusions that she would come through the surgery itself – a staggeringly unlikely outcome – let alone survive long enough to lead them back to Mars via this so-called Aresian Path. Given his doubts, one might then ask why he had agreed to the Archimandrite Venture at all. The answer was deliciously, ambitiously simple. Agreement with the Fabricator General’s desperate hopes had been the only way to learn all of the details pertaining to the Emperor’s Great Work.

  And oh, the things Land was learning.

  Much as a painting was formed not only of pigments and water and parchment, but also the individual hairs that made up a brush and the years of expertise at the artist’s fingertips, the many layered codes running through the cogitators amounted to one thing.

  A map.

  A map in impossible dimensions of a realm that couldn’t exist. A map that was being poured piecemeal into Hieronyma’s mind.

  He smiled as he watched the data flood. ‘Poured into’ is the wrong term, Land thought. More like ‘etched upon’.

  The pain must have been monumental, even to her stripped nervous system. Having a world’s worth of data inloaded like this would send reason screaming from the mortal consciousness. Frankly, he was impressed she was still alive four hours into the procedure. If she survived it would be unlikely that Hieronyma would be able to entertain any other thoughts in her skull. The map would swallow her consciousness and all of her concentration. It was simply that vast.

  Through the viewing window, he caught sight of Hieronyma thrashing on the surgical table. The attendants – the Fabricator General among them – were bleating and murmuring about convulsions. The immense metal limbs of Hieronyma’s new form crashed and twitched. A huge three-barrelled energy cannon rotated on her forearm, trying to fire, whirring in starvation. A tremor of the nervous system most likely, or a randomly firing synapse in the brain. He doubted she was genuinely trying to kill the surgeons attending her, though… Well. With what was going on in her mind, one couldn’t be sure.

  Land took no particular joy in the pain she must be feeling, but nor did her torment exactly inspire him to the precious heights of sympathy. She chose this fate, after all. The yearning of homesickness had driven her to it, which Land could understand – and even consider admirable, in its rather petulant earnestness – but she’d also been led by her faith in the Fabricator General, and that was something the technoarchaeologist considered endlessly mystifying.

  He returned his attention to the map’s code, partly due to the worry it would stop flowing once Hieronyma died. He had to learn what he could while there was still time.

  The heart of the map was a city. It had catacombs, which were a laby­rinth with several hundred passages abruptly severed or otherwise unfinished, and thousands of other routes leading out from its edges like capillary veins. The city existed in three hundred and sixty degrees, as if it covered the entire inside of a great shaft or tunnel. It called to mind the tales of Old Earth space installations that rolled in the void to create artificial gravity, though this city was ultimately motionless. It merely existed, static, at every angle, including the impossible ones.

  Nor were the city and its catacombs the entirety of the map. They weren’t even the majority of it. From the city’s edges, thousands of capillary tunnels branched out in a seemingly endless and random network, following no sense of human order and leading to no specific destinations.

  Land could grasp all of this. That wasn’t the problem.

  No, the problem was the way the map evolved even as it was being imprinted within Hieronyma’s mind. It shifted and changed moment by moment, as if the realm it was mapping had only the loosest relationship with the corporeal flow of time. Since the expeditionary teams had started surveying this hidden region, thousands upon thousands of subtle shiftings had occurred, as if the labyrinth reacted to something – some outward pressure – and sought to stabilise itself. And all of the shifts, in excruciating detail, were being scarred onto Hieronyma’s brain.

  The map-code’s intricacies would have been on the edge of mortal comprehension even in three dimensions. In four, it was almost laughably, terrifyingly fascinating.

  In the surgical chamber, Hieronyma’s mouth worked in silent futility. Land spared a moment to watch Kane injecting her with something pale blue and milky, something that in no way lessened her thrashing and completely failed to stabilise her spiking vital signs. As her head bucked, its bevy of mechanical replacements bared without her hood, Land saw her staring through the chamber’s window, right at him. Her eye-lenses revolved and refocused. He was certain he detected something pleading in her machine-gaze. And, perhaps, something of regret?

  Land looked back to the monitors. On and on the data streamed.

  Soon the cartography and chronology were joined by archival data that defied belief, let alone possibility. Scans and analyses made by the Unifier-caste tech-priests, quantifying the nature of the realm in which they worked, and… and the foes they faced.

  Land’s eyes widened. His mouth slowly, almost delicately, parted and hung open. In the chamber, the thrashing, writhing machine that Hieronyma was becoming suddenly fell still, motionless but for her trembling.

  ‘Teeth of the Cog,’ said Land. Awe softened his curse to a whisper.

  His eyes flickered. A realm of psychically resistant passageways. A realm that existed not within the warp but in spite of it. A realm that allowed travel across vast distances without ever once entering the reach of the warp’s unreliable and treacherous tendrils. A realm that shifted as part of its resistance to the warp’s corrosive touch, realigning itself to remain immune.

  A web. The webway.

>   His eyes flickered. A realm flooded by warp entities. Beings formed from hatred and madness and emotion. Creatures born of every emotion ever felt, taking form and twisted behind the veil of reality. Monsters formed of the warp’s matter and flooding into this ancient, precious sanctuary.

  His eyes flickered. A realm shattered by Magnus the Red. A realm gouged open with lethal wounds in its protective psychic sheath. A realm sundered by immense releases of sorcerous power that allowed the infection of these beings – the daemons – to spread.

  His eyes flickered, shining with the threat of tears. Vulnerabilities! Weaknesses in the process! Signs of decay in the alien-made sections of the webway, and worse, the flaws of incomplete human knowledge in the Mechanicum-built sections. They weren’t psychically sheathed, as the ancient and original structures were. The human-engineered halls of the endless labyrinth were protected by…

  His eyes flickered, and now he wept. A great machine. A machine of such power and purity as to defy mortal thought. A throne of gold, built to house the Emperor’s power. The Omnissiah’s Throne, the seat of the Machine-God Himself, harnessing and focusing His psychic might into the webway, bolstering the Mechanicum-made conduits. A soul-engine that roared power into this secret and sacred realm, shielding the Mechanicum’s iron and steel against the daemons clawing against it.

  His eyes flickered and streamed with awed tears, just as Ancient Terran tales told of men and women weeping before the faces of their false gods. The abandonment of the Great Crusade. The appointment of Horus as Warmaster. The Emperor’s retreat into the Imperial Dungeon. The treachery of Magnus the Red. The Custodian Guard. The Silent Sisterhood. The Unifiers. The War in the Webway. The Emperor’s Great Work. The magnum opus that was the very reason the Omnissiah had reached up into the night sky and united the two empires of Mars and Terra. It was for this. It was all for this. It was all for this.