‘I have re-attuned them twice now,’ the old man replied. Around his words, the breath of the ventilation systems roared on. Air filtration gargoyles breathed in the forge scent and exhaled recycled air, dragon-keen, doing little to diminish the sweltering heat. ‘And I say again, baroness – the flaw is with the Merging. You are blaming consecrated metal and obedient mechanisms when all evidence points to a disconnect between scion and Knight.’
Two servitors walked forwards to remove her breastplate and pauldrons, but Jaya warned them back. ‘I spent all of last night in meditative reflection,’ she argued. ‘I feel no such disconnect.’
Torolec moved away, heading towards the idle Knight, giving Jaya little choice but to follow. The sacristan held up two bionic hands extending from the same elbow, placing twin palms on the unpainted Knight’s armoured toe-plating.
‘You resist its noble spirit. It resists yours. Two stubborn souls locked in discord.’
Jaya pursed her lips. Only Torolec would be allowed to speak to her so. ‘My spirit is at ease,’ she lied.
‘Then I shan’t argue with you, baroness.’ Torolec looked up at the towering war machine in all its bleak glory. Where proud and bright house colours should show, only bare and scratched metal met the eye. Where war banners should hang, depicting the Knight’s own deeds and the honourable service of its scion pilot, there was nothing at all. Soon they would march to war in these cast-offs and jury-rigged exiles from still-living houses, and do battle for the first time without Vyridion’s pennants waving in the wind.
‘I find you in a mood of rare charity if you are unwilling to argue,’ said Jaya.
Torolec’s amusement showed on his wizened features, sparkling in his eyes. ‘You should reboard, baroness. Perhaps the next exercise will work towards merging you with your new armour. We are scheduled for weapons trials.’
‘I have dry-fired that decrepit thing’s guns a hundred times.’
‘Indeed! Today, however, you are to be loaded for live fire.’
Jaya stared at him. They had been waiting over a week for the anticipated shipment from House Mortan. ‘We have ammunition?’
‘At long last, being ferried to us as we speak.’ He paused, his amusement darkening. ‘You will of course be expected to make an appropriate display of gratitude to House Krast for the sharing of sacred resources from their forges.’
‘Krast?’ Jaya’s tone rang with disbelief. ‘Those vainglorious…’
‘Ah, ah,’ Torolec chided. ‘Those generous and noble souls, you were about to say?’
‘…but of course. What of their earlier refusal?’
‘The Sigillite is said to have leaned upon them in this matter.’
Jaya watched as another gunmetal grey and badly dented Knight stalked past, shaking the hangar ground with its tread. The machine was in dire need of cleansing and re-oiling; the whining of protesting iron was torture on the ears.
Torolec saw her wince. ‘Perhaps you might easier win the suit’s regard if you stopped referring to it as “that decrepit thing”. The others of our court seem to be adapting well.’
Jaya had the grace to accept the rebuke. ‘Most are, yes.’
‘Your resentment is understandable, baroness. But I know you do not need me to caution you on the vice of ingratitude.’
Again, she nodded. At least they had suits. Even these unmarked and untended exiles were a treasure any Knight House would consider a fortune in their own right. But to have fallen so far, so fast, to be relying on the scrapyard charity of indignant and indifferent houses…
Jaya took a breath. ‘Summon me when the ammunition shipment arrives.’
Torolec said nothing. He merely bowed.
The throne rocked beneath her, its suspensors worn down through a gestalt of time, damage and poor maintenance. Jaya’s spinal plate locked into a groove along the chair’s backrest, the connection triggering a flare in the cockpit’s red lights and kindling three more monitors. Her weighted boots crunched into their stirrup-locks. Her gloved hands gripped the guidance levers that rose up from the throne’s armrests.
Torolec had ascended the gantry ladder after his mistress, and now crouched his emaciated form at the airlock door above her. He reached in with several bionic hands, locking buckles and inserting penetrative interface cables into the baroness’ helm. But the sacristan didn’t linger beyond his murmured blessings. He bade her well and sealed her in with a ringing, echoing clang.
Jaya watched the hangar through her vision feeds, waiting for the gantries to be pulled away. Three Errants, unmarked and unbannered, were marching back to their boarding cradles for maintenance and reblessing, and far more importantly, for rearming. One of them turned to her as it passed with its ground-shaking tread, its hunched shoulders and faceplate grinding down in approximation of a brief half-bow. Jaya couldn’t return the gesture with her boarding gantries still locked in, but she reached for the vox-plate to send an acknowledgement pulse back to the pilot.
She didn’t know who it was. Gone forever were the days of knowing each scion by the heraldry their Knights wore and the banners they bore. Even the painted artistry of kill-markings was absent.
Shame burned fresh. House Vyridion and Highrock itself had died under her guardianship. And, with dark hilarity, her shame couldn’t even be recorded in the familial archives, for they were ash along with the world that had been Vyridion’s home for thousands of generations.
I am becoming maudlin, Jaya thought with a sigh. Less than a month ago I was expecting execution.
Torolec was right. Ingratitude was an impious vice.
The cockpit’s bleak redness flickered once, twice, then the light around her was suddenly pale yellow instead of oppressive scarlet.
‘Gantry cradle clear,’ came Torolec’s voice across the vox.
Jaya clenched the control levers and eased them forwards. The cockpit tilted forwards in sympathy, leaning with the motion. Jaya’s throne stabilisers lagged a few seconds behind, but the heavy tilting and lurching as the Knight began its stride was nothing more than a vague irritation to a scion who had lived her life in the saddle.
And yet, everything was different. The machine didn’t walk as her baronial Lancer had walked. Its piston-tendons compressed and extended with different air-hisses and at different speeds. Its gait rattled and clanged and clanked in an entirely different chorus of sound. The throne reacted differently to her weight and movements. The Knight’s posture and rhythm required different compensational adjustment when moving at speed. The visual monitors were in different places, and slaved to feeds and target locks and aura-scryers that operated on momentary circuit-lags, or detuned if exerted a certain way. The cockpit even smelt different; rather than the sacred incense of Highrock’s iluva herbs, no amount of Torolec’s consecrations could rid the cockpit of that scorched blood and burned-metal scent lingering beneath the smell of old corrosion. Every one of Vyridion’s new Knights had been acquired from wreckships and unused war spoil from local, loyal houses, and each one of them smelt exactly as one would expect a machine from such a fate to smell.
Even so, it wasn’t that she couldn’t endure these changes or that cataloguing them led to distraction. The truth was far blunter than anyone not of a noble Knightly bloodline could ever easily grasp. After a lifetime of piloting her own machine, Jaya was living inside a body that wasn’t her own. She was wearing someone else’s skin.
She walked the still-unfamiliar Knight through the hangar, swaying against the buckles of her throne with its graceless gait. Runic signifiers on her weapon monitors showed her ammunition by weight instead of exact numerals, estimating payloads. She felt her teeth clenching at the prickle along her skin, the blood-rush of bearing lethal armament once more.
For the first time since setting eyes upon this war machine, she felt the tremble of a connection. She could kill again. She could destroy.
This was strength. This was power.
What was your name? she wondered, looking around the cockpit. Who were you before you were beaten, shamed and left for dead?
She brought the Knight around towards the hangar’s rear, where the massed wreckage of tanks and troop transports was serving as obstacles to manoeuvre around or assault with arm-mounted melee weaponry. Recognising their baroness’ approach, two other scions walked their machines back out of the way, giving her the field.
And she swore in that moment that she felt the immense engine block housed in the armoured compartment behind her growl just a little louder.
She glanced to the crackling monitor linked to her left arm’s gun-feed. Target locks refused to hold. Alignment chimes that should be ringing in clear, constant signals instead stuttered and hiccupped. How typical of this machine. How–
No. No more excuses. She didn’t care. She leaned forwards in the throne, riding the uncomfortable, shaking gait, and guided the war machine’s left arm upwards. No trajectory calculations. No aiming. No hesitation. She raised the arm and fired.
Stabilisers kicked in late, subjecting her to two seconds of teeth-clacking shivers, but Jaya scarcely noticed. Her grin was morbid with black laughter as a stream of tracer fire roared forth and pulverised the wreckage of a loader transport, punching molten yellow holes in its scorched hull. By the time her heart had beat six times, the flyer was barely recognisable. In its place lay a steaming mangle of blighted metal.
Jaya strode forwards, her clawed mechanical feet crushing thousands of spent shells into the deck. The sword that formed her right arm thunder-cracked into life, sheathed in an energy-spitting power field. A second peal of thunder rang out across the great hangar as she battered the annihilated wreckage aside with the swinging blade.
Later, she would remember hearing cheers across the vox. Later, she’d recall Torolec’s pleased murmurs of benediction. Later, she’d rest well for the first time in months.
The Knight-Castigator overbalanced on the backswing, almost stumbling; Jaya slammed the opposing foot down, catching herself from falling, and immediately reared back up to full height. Another skull-rattling volley spat in a tracer stream from the over-under twin barrels of her primary cannon, stitching a trail across the hulls of three trashed Rhinos.
The blade fell again, swinging down in an impaling execution – a warrior finishing off a fallen foe. Jaya slammed a foot down on the shattered civilian transport beneath her, keeping it in place as she wrenched the sword free again. This time she didn’t overbalance. Flakes and scraps of metal sizzled along the sword’s edge as they dissolved in the power field’s heat.
The towering Knight raised its blade high before an audience of menial hangar crews, servitor slaves and their sacristan overseers; yet the gesture wasn’t for them. In ragged mimicry, the active Knights present each answered as best they could. Some raised blades or bullet-starved barrels of their own, others blared raw noise from their bullhorns, while those rendered unarmed and otherwise silent lowered their unpainted faceplates in respect.
Sacristan Apex Torolec consulted the data-slate in two of his four hands, allowing himself a thin smile at the sight of his baroness’ cockpit feed. Perhaps this was going to work, after all.
Thirteen
What has happened before
The use of glory
Prophecy and foresight
Ra opened his eyes to absolute blackness. A darkness deep enough to penetrate the senses, filling his eye sockets like pools of spilled oil. He waited for his perceptions to align. There was no fear. He knew the sensation of his master’s summons.
Remorse sat within his heart, this time. The ambush at the Ossuary still tore at him, its questions presenting no easy answers.
We were so close.
No answer came from the Emperor – if his king had even heard.
Soon, there was light. Faint. Fractured. Tormentingly distant. Light manifesting in pinpricks, the iota-eyes of faraway suns. They speckled the void in a milky rash, glinting, winking, each one staring with a light that took a brief eternity to reach Ra’s senses.
He was without form and shape. He merely existed in the void, a presence above a world cradled in the infinite black, a war-eaten planet bathed by the fusion glare of its insignificant yellow sun.
‘Terra,’ he said, without mouth, breath, teeth or tongue.
Terra.+ The Emperor’s voice thrummed through his skull. Disembodied, as eternal as any star. +Mere centuries ago, in the thrall of the Unification Wars. Warlords and archpriestesses and magician-kings and clan chiefs fight over the harrowed territory of a broken world. My Thunder Legion marches to war against them. Against all of them.+
‘It grieves me not to have fought at your side in those days, my king.’
Your loyalty is noted, yet your grief is irrelevant.+
‘Why am I here?’ Ra thought and spoke at once. No discernible separation existed between what was in his mind and what he vocalised into the void.
Because I will it.+
It was the only answer he required, but he had hoped for more. Whatever purpose this illumination served was, so far, beyond Ra’s guesswork.
With a wrenching lurch, the stars spun. Light bent and folded. The infinite blackness at once welcomed and rejected him, embracing his presence but defying his senses as he sought to process the speed at which he flew through the void. Nebulae bloomed before him, around him, as thick to the eyes as the poison gas clouds of forbidden weaponry, yet perfectly dark to all other senses. Worlds turned around god’s-eye stars, some seared beneath the fat blue heat of swollen suns, some left cold on the outermost edges of the stellar ballet, travelling almost in exile among the frozen rocks that tumbled through deep and lifeless space.
So many of these globular jewels were not jewels at all, as unsuited as they were to cradling human life. For all of the terraforming pushed upon the galaxy’s scattered worlds during the wonderworking of the Dark Age of Technology, an infinity of planets still revolved in the savage, storm-wracked, gaseous serenity that rendered human habitation impossible.
The true gems were just as varied in shade and hue. The alkali ochre of desert land predominated, planed smooth by the industry of colonisation or shattered in great chasm-rents by tectonic unrest. Oceanic worlds were turbulent sapphires and aquamarines swallowing sunlight beneath their immense depths – and many defied even water’s pure hue, instead saturated by endless seas stained chrysoberyl by choking clouds of bacterium life, or rippling carnelian depths playing haven to hosts of aquacarnosaurs.
Colour upon colour upon colour, many worlds blending their offerings together, landmass by varied landmass. And yet the blue-green of unriven Terran antiquity was rarest of all. Such an innocent shade defied inevitability: everywhere mankind set foot, it tore from the earth and sucked from the seas, it harvested and wrought. It claimed. It conquered. It destroyed.
Nowhere was this truer than amidst the worlds turning around Terra’s own sun. Ra hadn’t been surprised when he first saw Terra from orbit, seeing the Throneworld herself a sickly beige, strangled by pollution, raked by the scars of endless war. Mars, once terraformed into a place of palatial idyll where human ingenuity had brought forth vegetation from dead soil, had been war-torn back into the dustbowl barrenness of its pre-colonisation era.
Ra was far from those worlds now. He twisted bodilessly in the black, facing another cloud-wreathed sphere, this one a Pangaean orb of earthen continents and only modest seas. Cityscapes showed as grey bruising across the landmasses, becoming pinprick-lit beacons as night fell swiftly across the hemisphere. Mere heartbeats later, dawn returned to the visible hemisphere, extinguishing the cityscapes’ multitude of lights, restoring them to the grey blotches of any civilisation viewed from orbit. Millions of people must have called the world home. Billions.
‘What world is this?’ Ra asked t
he void.
There was no answer. With the ease of taking a breath, he was flung through the night heavens once more, soaring dreamlike without weight or momentum.
A migraine took form before his senses, painting the void with the retinal smearing of terminal brain cancer. Stars burned the nebulaic gases around them, sending streams of shimmering poison back into the void. They burned and strangled in the shifting tides of some alien substance that was and wasn’t gas; that was and wasn’t real.
The Ocularis Malifica. A warp storm. The warp storm, where the alternate reality of the warp had shattered its way into truespace and curdled dozens of star systems in its hostile miasma. Here was where two universes met, and both suffered with the union.
He stared at the rotting eye polluting the void. It stared back, somehow seething, malevolent without sentience.
‘Why are you showing me all of this, sire?’
I am not. Not really. This is merely how you process what you are learning when our thoughts are linked. Your mind is attuning to the scale of what I am imprinting upon it.+
Absolute loyalty meant he took reassurance at the Emperor’s words. He did not, however, take much in the way of easy understanding.
‘Sire?’ he asked the void.
The void’s answer was to send him hurling through space, weightless and ethereal, surrounded by the scream of a dying species. Years ago. Centuries ago, when much of the galaxy’s human territories sweltered beneath the choking fire of Old Night’s warp storms.
Here, among the eldar, all was at peace. He saw orbital platforms of sorcery-spun bone, so delicate that a breath of solar wind would surely shatter their tenuous frailty. He saw lush worlds of vegetation where spires of crystal and psychically sung wraithbone formed great spires and connecting walkways, while webway gates flared with endless use inside the towers of grand bloodlines. He saw a race crying out for more, always for more; for music that stimulated the biology of their brains; for wine that sent fire through their nervous systems; for entertainment and pleasures that replaced dignity with the harmony of madness.
The Master of Mankind Page 19