The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

And – through the disobedience of a primarch, the ignorance of a weapon that moronically believed itself a man – the magnum opus stood upon the precipice of failure.

  His eyes closed. Finally, as Hieronyma wheezed her last breath upon the table where she had been promised rebirth – at long last Arkhan Land understood.

  ‘I must come with you…’ he said, turning to Diocletian. The need in his voice bordered upon begging. He gripped the Custodian’s bracer, staring up at the warrior’s impassive faceplate. ‘I must join you in the Great Work.’

  The Custodian had stood in silence during the entirety of the surgery. He moved for the first time, turning to look down at the technoarchaeologist through emotionless eye-lenses. The whine of flat-lining vital signs echoed in the air around both men.

  ‘She keeps dying,’ was Diocletian’s reply. ‘You said this was the preparatory phase of the surgery.’

  ‘Custodian, please…’

  Diocletian looked back into the chamber, his features clear of any emotion.

  Something shivered inside the priestess’ skull. It curled and uncurled with revolting physicality, a tendril of prehensile ice dredging her brain matter. Its tremors caused no pain, but the pressure of its presence was the burden of high gravity applied directly to her skull and spine. She felt hunched, compacted, and the moment she tried to stretch to free herself was the moment she realised she wasn’t breathing.

  Not only that she wasn’t, she couldn’t. Heaving in to breathe met a wall of solid cold barricading her throat. Her lungs didn’t even twitch. Her body didn’t answer her urges to rise, to fight, to thrash, to do anything at all, to breathe, breathe, breathe.

  ‘Pulmonary instability,’ said a voice. Distant. Dispassionate. Sacred in its serenity. Without identity in the reddening black of her blindness. ‘Mark the ninth instance. Illuminate her.’

  Code flared through her reddening senses, numerals written in fire upon the wet meat of her mind. Its meaning eluded her.

  She screamed in mouthless, breathless silence.

  ‘Pulmonary spasms,’ came another voice, just as cold, just as enlightened.

  ‘Teeth of the Cog. She is trying to breathe again.’

  ‘Illuminate her.’

  Acid-numerals raked across the inside of her skull again. For all the pain of them, they were more distant now, harder to see, impossible to read.

  Strangling on her own silence, drowning in uncolour, she fell silently screaming away from everything.

  ‘Illumi–’

  The tendril uncurled slowly through the silt and sludge of her mind, coaxing her back. She felt slow, dense, her blood and thoughts alike turned sludgy with toxins.

  Dazed, drained and strangled, she fought to open her eyes.

  ‘Reactivation,’ said a voice from beyond.

  I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!

  ‘Convulsions. Pulmonary spasms. Mark the tenth inst–’

  ‘Illuminate her before–’

  The words weren’t fire or acid this time, they were pain itself. Scrawled directly onto the inside of her skull with talons of code.

  She stared at them. She felt them. She knew them.

  She stopped trying to drag air through the blockage in her throat.

  ‘Stabilising.’

  ‘Praise the Omnissiah.’

  She felt air whisper into her system, then flood her, cold and purified and rich in as much incense as oxygen. She could only breathe when she didn’t try to breathe. When she tried to work lungs she no longer had, she overrode the automated systems that respired for her.

  ‘Awakening.’

  She opened her eyes.

  The world exploded in red-stained holy light. Target locks saturated her vision. Prayer text and sacred code bathed her sight in layers of algebraic mandalas. Beneath what she could see was what she knew, a latticework map of impossible spatial distances that defied conventional physics. She shut that madness away and turned from the knowledge for now, needing to focus only on the immediacy of her surroundings.

  Hooded faces and surgical servitors looked down at her. No, not down. Up. She had thought she would be lying on her back, but the faces tilted towards hers were below her. She was bound to a standing gurney.

  Bindings cracked away in sweet hisses of released air pressure. Grinding machinery lowered her the half-metre to the ground as the last cabling snapped free.

  Behind the worshipful surgery-priests and their mindlocked cyborg slaves, a heavily augmented corpse lay upon another table. The cadaver was ostensibly female, headless, gored through autopsy, medicae drilling and organ harvesting.

  She knew that corpse. Even headless, its remains were brutally familiar.

  Hieronyma, the priestess thought. Me. I.

  Her clawed foot ground down on the polished metal floor. It shook the chamber.

  ‘Archimandrite,’ said one of the hooded priests. Tall. Many-armed. Savagely weaponised. Zagreus Kane Divine Bishopric of the Cult Mechanicum Fabricator General of Sacred Mars my lord my master – the knowledge was there once she accessed the data-stream, albeit with a slight delay.

  ‘Fabricator General,’ she said. Her voice, even to her own ears, was almost wholly human. A vox-simulation of her biological tone. At the sound of her voice, several of the adepts went to their knees, murmuring a mono-note ohm prayer, linking their knuckles in the sign of the cog.

  ‘Do you know?’ Kane asked, rumbling forwards on his tracked lower half. ‘Do you see the way back to Mars?’

  Her second step shook the chamber, the same as the first. As did the third. As did the fourth.

  As the weeks passed after the Archimandrite’s rebirth, Diocletian found himself alone more often than not. Kaeria was gone. He knew not where, only that she was dealing with the secret intricacies of her silent order elsewhere in the Palace. He had little to say to Baroness D’Arcus and her knightly kindred, nor did he find much worth in the stoic computations of the Mechanicum’s various overseers.

  Two souls consistently sought out his company: the pleading figure of Arkhan Land, and the serenely lost presence of Dominion Zephon. Now that the Archimandrite Venture had succeeded, Diocletian had no further use for the former. He would likely allow the technoarchaeologist to join the expedition back to the Impossible City, even if only on the rare chance the explorator’s knowledge would prove useful. And as for the Blood Angel, the so-called Bringer of Sorrow would serve well enough merely by accompanying them into the webway when the time came.

  It was the delay that wore at the Custodian’s patience. The Mechanicum’s requisitioned supplies were already proceeding through in a convey stream, thousands of battle-servitors, tracked conveyors, robots and even the rare sicarii funnelled through to their fates within the Great Work. The first shipments would already have reached Ra by now, reinforcing the Impossible City.

  And yet Diocletian waited. Impatient, but without any show of temper. House Vyridion drew ever closer to war readiness; the Archimandrite was adjusting to its new form and its enhanced cognition. Things were proceeding as expected, even if not with a swiftness Diocletian would have preferred.

  His place was to oversee every item of requisition, and he wouldn’t return to Calastar without doing so. He felt no frustration in doing his duty, only the vague concern that he could better be serving the Emperor elsewhere. Next to Ra on the walls of Calastar, perhaps, or slowing the foe in the outer tunnels, making them pay for each metre of misted ground they took. Something proactive. Something where he felt as though he were contributing to the defence of his master’s vision.

  The one thing he was not, however, was bored. He spent much of his time isolated within the Tower of Hegemon, the command core of the Legio Custodes’ efforts in the Emperor’s defence. Here Diocletian watched the continual streams of population data, materiel transport, and the aerial a
nd orbital traffic entering and exiting the Solar System, maintained by bank upon bank of cogitators and life-bonded savant-serfs in robes of Imperial scarlet. These data-artisans – each one tattooed with the aquila – dwelled within the Watchroom, where only those lifesworn to the Emperor were permitted. Rather than the dregs enslaved and augmented by the Machine Cult of Mars, none of the Ten Thousand’s serfs were cyborged to their stations or bound to live and die in their life support cradles. These men and women had sworn themselves to the All-Seeing Eye of the Emperor’s Custodians; they wore jewellery of sculpted bone made from the bodies of their mothers and fathers who served before them, and of the grandparents before them. In time their mortal remains would be harvested and ritual trinkets of their own bones gifted to their specifically bred children. To serve the Custodian Guard wasn’t merely a life sentence, it was an eternal, generational one.

  Much of the Watchroom’s information centred on the Palace itself, with Unified Biometric Verification feeds forming a living web of several million souls entering and exiting the Palace’s myriad districts.

  Diocletian watched this calculation of life taking place. Perhaps another soul might have seen something harmonic or musical in the display. Even among the Ten Thousand, such vigils usually took note of the hundreds of potential infiltration threats that might somehow slip past even the Imperial Fists. Yet Diocletian saw something unexpected in the patternless mess.

  He saw diminishing supplies even as Terra itself was broken down for materials, even as the Himalazia Mountains themselves were ground down for rock and ore. He saw fewer and fewer convoy fleets reaching the Solar System as the war raged on. He saw Terra strangled beneath the weight of off-world refugees, devouring their way through ever-diminishing resources. He saw fewer and fewer successful attempts to land reinforcements on Mars or bring materiel back through the Imperial blockade. He saw all of this written as plainly as the eight hundred and seventy-one words of his full name, laser-etched upon the inside of his breastplate, as familiar to him as the weight of the spear in his hands.

  Defeat. He was looking at defeat. The rebels were winning the war. Though their conquests across the galaxy were far from absolute, Horus didn’t need wholesale victory among the stars; the Warmaster needed only to amass enough support on the way to Terra and deny Imperial reinforcement reaching the Solar System. And, overwhelmingly, these ugly calculations painted a portrait of the Warmaster doing just that.

  Diocletian spent several days immersing himself in the reports and cogitations, seeking a wider view of the escalating conflict. It was in studying the movements of the rarest of all Imperial resources – the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood not currently deployed in the webway – that he discovered something tentative in the millions of cogitations. Something in the pattern was flawed, and it gnawed at Diocletian. Silent sections of code revealed shadows in the streaming figures. Equations were buried in the cogitations that returned half-truths as answers.

  Data deletions? he first wondered. But no, no. These weren’t holes in the pattern, merely patches of occlusion. Shrouded, not deleted. Hidden, not forbidden.

  Diocletian followed the patterns, watching them unfurl with a savant’s understanding of mathematic and algebraic principles. At first it seemed the serfs were themselves ignorant of the patterns, but soon enough he realised this wasn’t so: they were clearly aware, they were simply not flagging the curious elements for archival examination.

  He saw fleets of ships in the numbers. We have an entire fleet out there, scattered across three segmentums. Sailing the stars, avoiding the war.

  And more than that. Displacement calculations and void logistical data suggested these ships would descend on loyal worlds in the days and weeks before Horus’ forces committed to an invasion, yet they extracted nothing of any military significance, they landed no reinforcements and they evacuated none of the established regent-governments put in place by the Great Crusade.

  What, then, are they doing?

  None of the vessels were accounted for in the Great Crusade’s tallies, each one unattached to any expeditionary fleets. Nor were their dealings translated off-world, with no word transmitted by common routes, nothing from the divisions of the Astra Telepathica, and–

  There.

  Word had come in the form of a cursory transmission by a modest rogue trader fleet returning from the spiral arm of the Halo Stars. Her family’s armada had been negotiating for orbital resupply above the capital city of some nameless backwater still going by its allocated colonial code, when one of these logistically occluded vessels showed itself. Despite its obvious Imperial allegiance, it had refused all communication, completed several planetary operations, and left orbit for the system’s Mandeville point without illuminating the rogue trader fleet as to its purpose.

  The trader scion’s report concluded with a message from the planet itself, stating what little dealings its provincial quorum government had managed to have with the ships’ commander, including the vessel’s intent.

  ‘They came for our psychically attuned citizens.’

  Diocletian breathed a disbelieving laugh. A Black Ship. The Black Ships of the Silent Sisterhood are sailing across three segmentums, un­escorted, hiding from battle and harvesting psykers on an unprecedented scale. And they are doing it practically unseen by anyone, oath-binding whole governments to silence.

  Once he knew what ships were causing the flaws in the galactic pattern, the calculations solved themselves. Dozens of similarly shrouded equations noted Black Ships in Terra’s orbit, committing shuttles, loaders and transports of cargo to the planet’s surface without registering upon terrestrial traffic. And dozens more were drawing towards Terra from across the galaxy.

  Diocletian had a fair suspicion of just where Kaeria had gone. He turned to a nearby serf at a cogitation console and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘You.’

  The worker halted but didn’t look away from his screen. Numeric runes flashed upon his unblinking eyes. ‘Golden One?’

  ‘Arrange for a vox-link to the Magadan Orbital Construct. I wish to speak with the Mistress of the Black Fleet.’

  It came as no surprise to Diocletian when, two hours later, he saw a familiar figure on the crackling hololith connection. Kaeria stood at the side of a robed and cowled fellow Sister, the former armed and armoured just as Diocletian had last seen her, the latter with her eyes hidden by the fall of her hood. The Mistress of the Black Ships wore leather gloves with reinforced knuckles and dagger-length knives for fingernails. In the rippling holo image, she seemed to be clicking them together.

  ‘Mistress Varonika,’ he greeted the spindly creature clad in black, adding ‘Sister Kaeria,’ a moment later.

  The older Sister wove an elaborately formal greeting with her brutal finger-blades. Kaeria offered no more than a nod.

  Diocletian wasted no time. The door to the communications suite was sealed. He was entirely alone, bathed in blue holo-light. ‘What is the Black Fleet doing?’

  Both Sisters signed a reply at once, curt without rudeness.

  ‘And what is the Unspoken Sanction?’

  Another brief reply. One that Diocletian had expected.

  ‘Forbidden,’ Diocletian replied. Well, the Sisters of Silence were entitled to their secrets in the Emperor’s service. Never would they act without the Emperor’s command.

  ‘Where are you housing these harvested psykers?’ he asked.

  Again, a curt reply from both Sisters. Forbidden.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ the Custodian replied, ‘you cannot ship tens of thousands of psykers to Terra and hide them indefinitely. Have you taken their sustenance into consideration? Half of the Throneworld’s granaries already stand hollow. Water farms across the Afrik Swathe stand mute in rainless thirst.’

  He expected another blunt, curt response. To his mild surprise, Varonika replied by signing a longer
reply with both hands. Diocletian could almost imagine the click-clack of her bladed talons meeting on several of the words.

  ‘Then I will press no more on the matter,’ said the Custodian. ‘But in the Emperor’s name, tell me whether I might expect reinforcements in the webway as a result of your scheming.’

  The merest flicker of the older Sister’s finger-blades was enough to betray her hesitation. She signed a negative response, but Diocletian found her hesitation intriguing.

  ‘Very well. Am I to assume you will be returning when I lead House Vyridion and the Archimandrite’s convoy into the Dungeon, Kaeria?’

  The Oblivion Knight bowed her head once more, more formally this time. He needed no sign language to see her respect in the reply, nor any further explanation to note her refusal. She was staying there.

  ‘So be it. Good eve, Sisters.’ Diocletian terminated the link and exhaled slowly. He knew better than to pry further into whatever secrets they sought so ardently to protect. If they required his aid, they would ask for it.

  The Custodian turned back to the closest bank of monitors, resuming the staring absorption of limitless, scrolling data.

  Arkhan Land, visionary of the Mechanicum

  II

  Cargo

  This is not now. This is then. This is when she was caged away from everything she had ever known.

  Skoia sits on the floor, breathing slowly, listening to the voices of those trapped here with her. They don’t speak often; few of them know one another and no one has any answers to offer to the others. Sometimes there are brief outbursts of fury that begin with the aggressors beating their hands bloody on the sealed metal doors and end with them sinking, weak-limbed and no freer, to the floor. Others give in to despair and wail, or weep quietly alone, which achieves just as much – just as little – as angry defiance.

  At first there had been a sense of community and shared suffering, when the villagers and townspeople came to realise they were all ancestor-speakers and witch-priests, taken in a harvest tithe up into the belly of an Imperial spaceship. But the days became weeks, then months, and the cargo hold grew cramped with more and more people – these spoke in different languages and came from different worlds, and soon enough everyone was weak and weary enough to see out their suffering alone.