The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Twelve days of this would explain why you look terrible,’ Diocletian agreed. There was no humour in his tone.

  Sagittarus took stock of Dynastes and found it difficult to disagree with his kinsman’s appraisal. Juhaza was somehow still standing, though his stare was unfocused and he swayed as he held on to the ceiling rail. Solon stood next to him, teeth clenched as whatever corrosive foulness had splashed across his armour still fizzed and popped, unable to eat into the auramite but slowly dissolving the left side of his face.

  Solon grinned back at his leader. ‘I’ll live, Sagittarus.’

  Arkhan Land groaned a weak, troubled cry. The tank bucked as the relic hunter rammed something at high speed, and there was a brief rise as the repulsorlift plating carried the Raider over whatever he’d struck.

  ‘I… I can’t–’

  ‘Don’t stare at them,’ Sagittarus interrupted. ‘Fear makes them stronger.’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Who are you?’ the Dreadnought demanded.

  ‘I… Arkhan Land.’

  ‘I’ve heard of you.’

  ‘Just get us to the Godspire,’ said Diocletian.

  The daemon no longer soared on great wings above the city of arcane bone, nor did it stalk alone in silent predation. The wounds it had taken in its hunts were lessons of pain etched upon its corpus. No matter that it lacked the capacity to truly reason, it had still learned its lessons well. The threat of dissolution goaded it towards caution. Incarnate murder was unsuited to naked war, and even immortals could learn from agony.

  Alone among the horde, the daemon was kindred to every other creature. It was the piercing of flesh with a tool of war, and the blood that ran with the first slaying. It was the madness of the mind that comes from murder, and the rotting of a brother’s body. It was the savage and guilty pleasure of life triumphing over other life, and the panicked pain of knowing your own death has come. It was the deed that reshaped the destiny of a species.

  And thus, it could hide anywhere within the host. No shape was forbidden to it. No part of the ravening horde saw it as a shard of another Power. All were its kindred.

  The daemon shifted between forms, discontented with mere beasts of myth and pagan nightmare. It propelled itself as something feathered and winged, a creature of lies given hunched, avian form. It crawled on six legs. It slid across the ground slug-like on none. The cluster of senses that throbbed within its corpus skull acted in place of sight and scent, drawing it towards the next kill.

  It thinned its corpus to near-nothingness, becoming a virus within another daemon’s ichor sprayed against the faceplate of a Martian war robot. It thinned further, to mist, to air, seeping in through the cracks in the machine’s armour plating, infecting the biological cortex cradled in the cognitive soup. A moment later the Castellax turned its weapons upon its own kindred, annihilating them with its cannon and claws.

  Amused but unsatisfied, the daemon ghosted free of that semi-living cage and leapt skywards, embedding itself in the cold, cold metal of an ornithopter passing overhead. Small effort to warp the vehicle’s iron hull, rippling through it, heating it, swelling it – sending biological vein-threads through its inorganic form and rewriting the machine’s essence. The daemon could feel the dull disquiet of the flying vehicle’s pilot as she lost control.

  The ornithopter exploded at the head of its formation. It didn’t scatter or fall from the sky; the daemon kept the spinning, burning shards of jagged metal loosely together, each fragment of debris taking its own shape. A flock of flickering, scorched raptor-things veered and whirled, a host of gargoyles with bodies of shredded metal and fire.

  Three other ornithopters veered away from the spreading cloud of burning, clawed homunculi, but it was already too late. The cloud of savaged metal razored through them, a thousand cuts shredded their hulls and wings beyond function, plunging them from the air. The daemon lingered within each vessel long enough to savour the sickly sweet death-thoughts of their doomed pilots, then it was gone, coalescing once more in the teeming horde below.

  With a predator’s instinct it sensed it was being hunted. Somehow, the Anathema’s Daughters could see it no matter the form it took. When it revealed itself they were the ones to give chase. They summoned the Golden, they directed the machine rage of the towering metal constructs striding throughout the city. The rawness of its consciousness knew pain, and it was not supposed to be this way. As strong as it was, it couldn’t hold to incarnation if it sustained many more wounds. It bled now. Everything that bled could be killed.

  The daemon had killed several of the Anathema’s Daughters, finding nothing within to devour. Their flesh was tasteless, their deaths without nourishment or joy. It felt their presence as a devouring chill, their nearness dragging at its incarnated form, unwinding the threads of its essence. With low, hungry cunning it had learned to blend in among its lessers, taking their shape, mimicking the weakness of their forms until the perfect moment at the apex of each kill. Such immersion deceived the Golden and the grey, robotic souls at their sides. But never the Soulless. The Anathema’s Daughters always knew. To face them was to fight crippled and weakened; the daemon knew the weary, desperate weakness from its own hunts, seeing the futile thrashings of those it killed most slowly. To face the Soulless was to face the same destruction the daemon inflicted upon all others.

  The creature’s crude, vicious sentience rebelled at being considered prey. It shifted and changed and drifted, starving itself in the heat of war in a bid to go unnoticed. It ghosted away from the running battles, avoiding those where it sensed the tides of its kindred crashing against the leeching resistance of the Soulless.

  In hiding, it took forms beyond the sphere of mortal sight. It became a disease. Then a breath, a death rattle, wet and clicking in a man’s throat.

  A promise.

  A whisper.

  A fear.

  A regret.

  A thought.

  It trickled itself into several minds, dividing its consciousness with amoebic mitosis, seeking, seeking, seeking. Many minds were inviolate; they would take too long to overwhelm. These, it left alone. Stars would die before it mastered one of the Golden.

  The grey machine-men provided simpler conquests, yet they were uselessly fragile to husk-ride. It settled in the minds of war servitors at barricades across the city, forcing them to turn their weapons upon one another and – in rare, precious instances – to fire into the backs of the Golden advancing ahead. But the Golden destroyed these threats as soon as they became aware of them, and far worse, there was a paucity of thrill, guilt or any emotion at all in servitors made to murder one another. They felt too little; they killed without passion or panic. Thus, they offered no sustenance.

  It drifted onwards, plunging at last into a mortal mind that had known enough bloodshed and battle to drench every one of its own memories in bitter red. This man – not one of the Grey nor one of the Golden – was enthroned within cold iron. The daemon looked through his eyes, seeing the compact confines of a piloted vehicle’s cockpit; males and females chattered in their human tongues and machine codes around him, creating an aura of noise. These weaker mortals looked upon their master as a king.

  The daemon threaded itself through the man’s thoughts, twining around the man’s aggressive hungers, riding through the lactic tingle of adrenaline in his system. Many of the voices and emotions within his skull weren’t even his own; they goaded him with artificial rage, coming from some synthetic source.

  The machine, it knew. The vehicle itself. These were the bond-machine’s emotions colouring the man’s mind with artificial rage.

  The daemon knew, then, where it was. It closed its invisible tendrils around the meat of the man’s organs, gently squeezing. Life and lore trickled from the pressured organs, haemorrhaging language and knowledge and insight into the daemon’s cavernous perceptions.

&
nbsp; ‘Moderati,’ he said, speaking with the mouth of Princeps Enkir Morova of the Reaver Titan Black Sky.

  ‘Aye, my princeps?’ replied Talla, a woman shorn of hair, haloed in cables, hardplugged into her own control throne.

  Enkir bared his teeth in a wet smile. In harmonic response to its master’s amusement, Black Sky blared its war-horns across the embattled city.

  Seventeen

  The covenant of Terra and Mars

  Tribune

  Unspoken Sanction

  The commanders convened at the Godspire. Those who couldn’t withdraw from the field were forced to appear in hololithic form, their life-size images diluted of colour and flickering with interference. Whatever purpose the circular chamber had served in the age of the eldar empire was overshadowed by the machinations of its current Imperial occupiers, who met amidst chattering cogitators and medicaes working on the wounded. A central table ran on low power, projecting a thin green holo of Calastar’s maddening tubular geoscape. Anti-air turrets hammered their payloads skywards in a ceaseless song, sending shivers through the wraithbone tower.

  Even as Diocletian drew breath to address the gathered officers, the image of Princeps Feyla Xan shrank back in her control throne and blinked out of existence. Several of the gathered officers made the sign of the aquila or linked their knuckles in the sigil of the cog, gravely acknowledging Xan’s evident demise.

  ‘The city holds,’ said Diocletian. There were nods around the table. Most were desperately weary. ‘We all have somewhere to be, so let’s be swift. Archimandrite?’

  The Archimandrite stood hunched over the holotable, the Domitar-like chassis that had become her new form towering above all others present. Her murky faceplate offered an unreliable suggestion of the face within.

  ‘I have inloaded a complete and constantly updating awareness field of the Mechanicum’s present forces,’ she vocalised from the bronze speaker-gills in her chest. ‘This information is drawn from the exloaded sensories of each alpha unit active within Calastar. Lacking any orbitals for requisite scanning and atmospheric intelligence, I am devoting significant data runnage to maintaining an active tactical sensory overview for each of these alpha units.’

  ‘Can you render this information usable by the rest of us?’ asked Diocletian.

  ‘Yes, albeit in primitive form.’ Unmodified humanity lacked the biomechanical enhancements required to see things in the ’spheric datastreams available to the cultists of Mars. ‘Vocalisation and crude holo-imagery will have to suffice.’

  ‘It will,’ the Custodian replied.

  ‘I speak with the aforementioned insight in mind,’ the Archimandrite augmitted. ‘Summation – the Mechanicum has access to the most accurate, evolving overview of the field of conflict, accessible by all unit leaders. Result – cohesion and performance will be accordingly improved. Judgement – as the disposition of forces currently stands, the city will fall. Enemy reinforcement will only hasten the process. This is an unacceptable outcome.’

  Dense servos and fibre bundle muscle-cables whirred as Zhanmadao of the Tharanatoi gestured to various points of scathing conflict on the holo. ‘They’ve gained precious little ground so far. Ignatum holds the choke points leading into the repaired arterials, with the majority of the skitarii and the Unifiers’ war servitors. Tribune Endymion has the Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand deployed in defensive positions along major thoroughfares, denying the city to the enemy.’

  ‘So the city holds,’ Diocletian repeated.

  ‘The city holds for now,’ declared Zhanmadao. He was a pale figure, almost unhealthily so, clad in the bulk of his shining Cataphractii armour. His black hair didn’t quite hide the faint markings of blue tattoos on his scalp, legacies of a childhood among the coastal tribes of the faraway world upon which he’d been born.

  ‘But the Archimandrite is right,’ he continued, ‘and this is a shadow of what’s yet to come. Outrider reports have been filtering in for the last two day cycles. Troop transports, Titans, hordes of the warp-wrought. The reinforcements you have brought us today, along with those sent ahead in convoys for the last month, are allowing us to stand our ground. But gone is any realistic vision of crusading forth. This entire sector of the webway is flooded with the foe. We can’t hold the Impossible City for more than three or four days.’

  The Blood Angel finally lifted his gaze from the revolving holo. ‘Where, may I ask, is Tribune Endymion?’

  ‘And Commander Krole,’ added Diocletian. ‘Can no one reach them via holo?’

  The Terminator gestured again, indicating a portion of the rotating map on the tunnel’s ‘ceiling’. If the host of flashing runes was anything to go by, the fighting was thickest there.

  ‘The Sister-Commander has led the forces defending the main entrance to the city’s catacombs,’ said Zhanmadao. ‘The greatest concentration of defenders stands with them.’

  Diocletian didn’t need to be told why. If the foe broke through to the catacombs, it was a short journey from there into the Mechanicum’s sections of the webway. And then, on to the Dungeon itself.

  ‘I am present, as well.’ This from one of the skitarii alphas, manifested as a hololith. The figure was seated on an unseen slab that failed to project into the image. Hands moved in and out of the holo as tech-adepts worked on the augmented warrior’s damaged limbs. A shattered chordclaw was being machined out from his wrist. The hydraulic musculature of his right thigh was being hastily reworked. A scorched chestplate sigil marked him as Echo-Echo-71.

  ‘Has there been word of Ra?’ asked Zhanmadao.

  ‘Probes have been dispatched to reach the tribune. He is engaged with the forward elements. The fighting here is spire to spire. Dense. It occludes individuals. Tracking becomes a trial.’

  ‘I am inloading no vision-data from alpha units present near enough to Tribune Endymion or Sister-Commander Krole to relay accurate streams back to me,’ said the Archimandrite. The robotic chassis lowered on growling hydraulics, seeming to Diocletian suddenly threateningly ursine. ‘Casualties are severe.’

  ‘Acknowledged and confirmed,’ the skitarii warlord replied. The four mismatched lenses that served as his face within the hood rotated as they refocused.

  This is war without orbitals, cursed Diocletian. It had been different in the tunnels for all those years. Jetbike outriders carried messages and reports to and from the barricaded passages, maintaining easy if frantic lines of communication. But with a whole city spread open and besieged, chaos reigned.

  This is one of the webway’s principal hubs. Can we afford to lose it? How many years will its loss put the Great Work back?

  ‘What of any updated evacuation contingencies?’ he asked.

  One of the hololiths spoke, a Titan princeps hardwired into an armoured throne. His faceplate was modelled into the same snarling visage as the Warhound he piloted.

  ‘Prefect Coros! We bled for a year to take this city.’

  Diocletian turned to the man’s image. ‘And that year was merely one of the five we have been consigned within the web. If we are forced back into the Unifiers’ passageways, so be it. It doesn’t change our duty. What matters above all is that we defend the Mechanicum’s tunnels. The enemy must not reach Terra.’

  ‘We can hold the city,’ said another hololith. One of the robed and hooded sicarii, the skitarii elite echelon. He, she, or indeed it – it was impossible to know with many of them – cracked its taser goad into life. ‘Any rumination of evacuation must bear the following factors into the final equation. Primaris – that once abandoned, there will be an infinitesimal probability of retaking Calastar again without significant reinforcement, far beyond what currently stands within the garrisons of the Solar System. Dislodging an entrenched enemy here would be a prospect of mathematically ludicrous possibility. Secundus – the Scion of Vigilant Light cannot flee. Evacuation would necessitate the dismantling a
nd reconveying of the god-machine in its component pieces.’

  Zhanmadao shook his head. ‘No time. You know there’s no time, Protector. The Scion would remain, either with its crew evacuated so they might fight another day, piloting another Titan… or ensconced, allowing the Scion to fight as part of the rearguard.’

  Several of the princeps and skitarii alphas present shared canted exchanges through their linked vox-melange.

  ‘I assure you,’ the Custodian Terminator vowed, ‘I’m well aware of the sacrifice that your Legio would be making.’

  ‘Ignatum cannot accept these terms,’ said the aged princeps of the Empiris Crescir. ‘The Scion cannot be abandoned.’

  We are already falling apart, Diocletian thought.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said slowly. ‘Forget the pride of your Legio, Kaleb Asarnus. Forget the battle-lust of the war machine singing inside your blood. Forget the last five years we’ve waged war together, the banners of heraldic glory that sway from your Reaver’s weapon limbs and the companions we have all lost. Look at me, look at the colour of my armour, and remember whose authority I speak with.’

  The princeps’ features were masked behind his ceremonial helm. But he nodded.

  This time, the Archimandrite growled a retort. ‘The Mechanicum has committed resources far exceeding acceptable parameters, sacrificing the retaking of Sacred Mars, in order to defend Calastar. It was made clear to us that this was a focal point within the webway. A spoke-nexus. A route-hub. Our participation in the Great Work on this scale came with the condition of keeping the Aresian Path open for a possible invasion of our homeland.’

  ‘We are doing all we can,’ Zhanmadao pointed out through gritted teeth.

  ‘You see those of us among the Cult Mechanicum as lacking emotive responses, but that is base ignorance. All souls, augmented and unaugmented, fight harder with something to fight for. The retaking of Sacred Mars galvanises us, as well as being promised to us. Summation – the Impossible City must not fall.’