The Master of Mankind

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘I know, my Custodian. I know. It is meaningless now.’

  More shouting. Workers and scientists were running now, moving away from the overloading machines. The illumination of the throne room took on a strained, desaturated cast.

  Constantin Valdor ran to the Emperor’s side, oblivious to the fact his master was playing no part in a performance that had all happened before.

  The Emperor had turned to him then, Ra recalled, and said ‘Summon Jenetia Krole. Assemble the Ten Thousand.’ This time though, he did not.

  ‘At once, my liege.’ Valdor turned away to make it so.

  ‘Something is coming through!’ cried one of the human workers.

  The Emperor ignored the spreading chaos. ‘Hear me, Ra. You must take word to the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood. I am leaving the Golden Throne. I am coming to you.’

  Ra’s blood sang. Eyes wide, he felt riven by sudden hope. It struck him with physical force.

  ‘Sire… How…’

  ‘The how does not matter. Hold, Ra. Fight. I will join you in the Mechanicum’s tunnels.’

  ‘But, my liege, all your work…’

  The Emperor silenced him with a stare.

  Behind Ra, the discoloured webway portal vomited incandescent flame into the throne room. He felt its searing heat, just as he had on that long-ago day. He watched himself with exalted, distracted eyes, moving to the Emperor’s side, forming a shield of Custodial auramite to protect his monarch from harm.

  The machines were detonating around them now. Many of the humans were on the floor, clutching at their bleeding eyes. The hateful radiance emerging from the webway had stolen their sight.

  Those still standing were no safer. Shrapnel flew in a lethal, burning blizzard, cutting them down in their dozens, shearing limbs from bodies, severing heads from shoulders. Wreckage clattered against Ra’s armour now, just as it rained against the same armour he had worn five years before. A dagger of jagged metal speared into Amon’s side, causing the Custodian to grunt across their shared vox.

  A bleeding, desecrated behemoth melted through the webway portal. It dripped with the blood of the souls it had sacrificed to reach this point in space and time. Laughter haloed its terrible form, the laughter of mad entities pantomiming as gods. Their laughter formed the silver strings of puppeteers, pulling at the creature’s limbs and thoughts.

  It said one word, one terrible proclamation with enough psychic ferocity to slay half of the panicking humans still breathing. They warped and thrashed and burned beneath the pressure of that single telepathic damnation, their flesh losing all integrity, their essences devoured from the inside out.

  FATHER.+

  Valdor was firing. Amon was firing. Ra, then and now, was firing. He and the image of himself reloaded in temporal harmony, slamming fresh sickle magazines home in their guardian spears, resuming the torrent of upward bolter fire.

  The pain of Ra’s wounds was gone. He didn’t think, didn’t care, that this was a memory. He unloaded his guardian spear into the daemonic avatar of Magnus the Red, just as he had done on that fateful day. He screamed through clenched teeth – again, just as he had done before, just as he was doing not two metres away now.

  Awaken, Ra,+ said the Emperor. +Fight on.+

  And as ever, His Custodian obeyed.

  Twenty-One

  That most sacred duty

  The end of many roads

  Awakening

  The Archimandrite calculated with all haste. There were doubts, of course. Hesitations. On some level it mused over the heretical nature of its choice, but to consider its actions heresy would be the result of flawed and limited perception. The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood, proving themselves untrue to the word given to the Fabricator General himself, were the guilty ones. The route back to Mars had to remain viable. The Aresian Path must stay in Imperial hands. Ensuring that circumstance was as far from heresy as could be conceived. Indeed, it was a sacred duty.

  And if it could not, would not be fulfilled by those responsible? Then the answer was not to flee back to Terra. Terra was safe. Terra didn’t languish under the traitorous grip of the false cult. Terra needed no reinforcing.

  No, there was only one logical answer that conformed to the relevant needs of Martian primacy. Only one course of action to take.

 

  With the webway’s cartography playing out in repetitive reassurance within the Archimandrite’s thoughts, it had been no hardship to plan the dispersal of the war servitors, robots, Protectors and Myrmidon war-priests that answered to the Archimandrite itself rather than the Ten Thousand. Those that the Archimandrite didn’t personally lead were sent with the earliest sections of the evacuation convoy, then granted enough insight into the Archimandrite’s mental map to deviate from the line of retreat and journey through secondary tunnels to double back. They drifted away at key junctions, navigating the webway via their overlord’s exloaded data.

  It had been easier still to filter through the layers of their loyalties through unspoken code exchanges, holding noospheric conversations with hundreds of them at once to ascertain their use and potential within the Archimandrite’s growing forces.

  It was under no illusions. It couldn’t retake Mars with the force accrued inside the webway. No matter. Holding the Aresian Path would be enough. The Omnissiah would commit far greater forces to the web in the next crusade, and the Archimandrite’s war convocation would be waiting, indefatigably in command of the most vital passageway in the entire network.

  If only Ignatum had been a viable consideration. Even one of the few remaining Titans would have been an beneficial omen, but the Archimandrite had known better than to even make the attempt of gaining their aid. The Titan crews of Ignatum were more flesh than metal, and the Archimandrite sensed their loyalties were as tightly bound to Terra and the Ten Thousand as to the Martian ideal. They ached for home as much as any of the displaced Cult Mechanicum, yet they held warrior-bonds with the Imperials and personal, inviolate oaths with the Omnissiah.

  Their skitarii, however, had proved far more receptive. Simple, weaponised creatures that they were, the Archimandrite had siphoned them away from around the ankles of the god-machines they protected, drawing them into secondary conduits and capillary tunnels, keeping them from the destruction being levied upon the Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand.

  The Archimandrite had canted its avowal to stand with the last convoy, warding them from harm – and then, as the final Imperials had battled their way into the tunnels beneath the Impossible City, it had performed its most calculated gamble and powered down amidst the devastation. Now it seemed to be nothing more than yet another wreck, another robot going tragically unsalvaged in the hours after this terrible battle.

  And it had worked. No warp beast had come to tear it apart in daemonic anger.

  A sliver of life remained within its core during this slumber, enough to maintain its few biological components. Those precious shreds of viscera that had once been Magos Domina Hieronyma couldn’t be allowed to rot.

  In the deep caves of the Godspire’s wraithbone foundations, sealed within a vault established by the Unifiers to house volatile materials for their reconstruction work, the Archimandrite reactivated slowly, sending power throughout its form in a trickle charge.

  Home, it thought.

  It. She?

  It.

  Though again… there were doubts. Logically, this yearning for home – could it be the corrupting influence of the core of Hieronyma within the machine? And if so, did that stand as testament to the purity of the Archimandrite’s cause, or was this an emotive flaw, a stutter of the precision of its plan?

  Furthermore: consider the role of external manipulation. Had this been anticipated? Expected? Planned by the Fabricator General? Had she been chosen to become It in the knowledge she would put her emotive loyalty
to her homeland above the needs of the Ten Thousand?

  The Archimandrite cast these considerations aside as irrelevant to its calculations. They were of no consequence now. The Cog, as it was sometimes said, was already turning.

  The Archimandrite’s first order of duty was to re-establish its noospheric network with the alphas and unit leaders it had won to its cause. And from there, on to the Aresian Path.

  Powering up completely, the war machine rose and began to cant to its underlings, assembling an internal map of where they were positioned.

 

  The alpha individual named and numbered by the signifier KRRJ-1211 (F) could not be said to possess much in the way of personality or ambition. In that regard he was little different from most of the basic-pattern skitarii, all of whom were surgically and chemically crafted for loyalty and obedience. He stared at the world through target-accumulator lenses grafted over eyes that had had their lids removed in order to provide his masters with continual inloads of data from his senses. And in this, too, he was little different from others among his kind.

  His lack of distinctiveness made him perfect for the Archimandrite’s purposes. Wholly loyal to Sacred Mars and entirely devoid of the higher brain function necessary to determine the action/reaction cause/effect of his conflict in loyalties, he obeyed the Archimandrite’s cants of , , with all the drone-like behaviour of a worker insect following a trail of its kindred back to the hive.

  In this instance, however, he was leading them. KRRJ-1211 (F) signalled a halt with a raised fist and a spurt of noospheric code. The warriors with him halted with the inhuman precision of gestalt unity. The conveyors carrying Unifier supplies, and some of the invaluable priests themselves, rolled on ahead through the misty tunnels. Queries from the Mechanicum archpriests responsible for building and rebuilding these very tunnels inloaded into KRRJ-1211 (F)’s senses, to which he responded with the requisite deception.

  he canted to them as they managed their conveyors or walked alongside their cargo haulers. This was a lie. This was somewhere between a lie and the truth. They were recalled to battle, yes, but KRRJ-1211 (F) simply had no intention of canting just where that battle would be taking place. He led his warriors away, leaving the Unifiers to believe he was returning to aid the rearguard.

  Not long after, he plunged into the mist of a side tunnel, leading his warband with him. They moved at a dead sprint, their piston legs carrying them at great speed through the winding passageways.

  The auxiliary tunnel as laid out on the Archimandrite’s map branched in over one hundred places, and one specific route would lead back to the Impossible City. Most notably, it required a brief traversal through one webway gate, exiting back into the material universe before quickly entering a nearby companion gate and continuing the journey onwards.

  Unfortunately for KRRJ-1211 (F), less than a day after the skitarii warband had set off on its sprint through the side passages, they passed from the Mechanicum’s rattling monstrosity of a tunnel into the psy-resonant material of the true web, and emerged into what appeared to be a long-dead garden, situated beneath the stars. The skitarii alpha paid brief heed to the dusty remains of flowers beneath his iron tread. He paid similarly little attention to the oddly angular statuary placed around the lifeless, grey garden. His focus was almost entirely fixed upon finding the companion gateway and returning the web to complete his journey.

  one of his more limited underofficers canted in alarm. She had no access to the webway’s map. Her limited intellect would have struggled to sustain even a portion of it.

  KRRJ-1211 (F) canted back in irritation.

  He had his back to the statuary, engrossed in his search, when the statues began to draw their swords. Even if he had been devoting his full concentration, he wouldn’t have recognised the lithe alien figures pulling blades of enchanted bone free from jewelled sheaths. He had never encountered the eldar species before, nor their funereal sentinels, the wraithkind.

  canted the Archimandrite some time later. The words augmitted across the still garden from KRRJ-1211 (F)’s vox-feed. The skitarii lay in pieces upon the dead grass along with his warriors, but the augmetic portions of his corpse retained enough internal power to receive transmissions.

  If the statues heard this static-flawed announcement, they showed no sign. Their swords were sheathed. Their heads were bowed. They waited in silence, wardens over new graves among the old.

  A clade of war servitors trundled through the web, following the Archimandrite’s precise directions. This particular clade – noted as LAM-Exios in the Fabricator General’s archives – was comprised of Martian criminals sentenced to servitoral repentance, not that any of them remembered who they were or what they were convicted of doing.

  Each of the lobotomised slaves bore significant firepower in the form of heavy-barrelled plasma calivers, rad-cannons and flamers enhanced by cognis targeting technology. They were perfect examples of the expendable troops that had died in their thousands defending the Unifiers over the last five years, and those that Zagreus Kane had sent in staggering numbers when Diocletian and Kaeria approached him with a requisition order.

  The LAM-Exios clade, to their credit, made it most of the way back to the Impossible City. Their journey halted when they encountered the devastated remains of a XVI Legion Reaver Company and its tank support seeking to cut ahead and ambush the fleeing Imperial convoys.

  As they were designed and programmed to do, the battle-servitors of LAM-Exios advanced with kill/extinguish battle subroutines, unleashing a withering torrent of firepower on the enemy units charging towards them.

  canted the Archimandrite. And indeed it was. By that time, however, a mere seventeen war servitors survived to limp or roll onwards after the battle. These near-mindless victors were slaughtered by the next enemy wave to come spilling through the tunnel, gutted and torn apart by World Eaters chainaxes, their heads taken as trophies to be skinned and hung from belts like shamanistic tokens.

 

  Aravolos of the Cult Myrmidia, his bulky form shrouded in tattered robes of Martian red, deactivated his link to the noosphere. Simultaneously strangling an officer of the Emperor’s Children with all four of his mechandendrites, and releasing sustained beams of volkite energy at the rest of the sergeant’s squad from his fixed gunlimb, he was already engaged in the consecrated act of waging war.

  His muddy, bloodstained consciousness lacked the time and focus for the Archimandrite’s treason.

  Heaving with his mechadendrites he lifted the ceramite-clad warrior into the air. A second application of effort crushed the warrior’s gorget, broke his neck and tore both arms from their sockets. Aravolos hurled the remnants towards the ignited, retreating figures of the sergeant’s squad, and turned in search of another life to end.

  Echo-Echo-71 abandoned the convoy and led his warriors into the ancillary tunnels, as ordered. He possessed more autonomy than many of his alpha-kind, even among other sicarii, but held little comprehension of the immensity of the Great Work even after several years of fighting inside its boundaries. The equation of his loyalty ended in simplicity: the representative of the Fabricator General had canted that Sacred Mars cried out for liberation, and that duty overruled any other.

  His expedition proceeded far more smoothly than many others. Without trouble, he reached the specific rendezvous locations marked by the Archimandrite, bypassing the tunnels she had calculated as most likely to be stormed by the foe. He sent out scouts to mark the passages yet to be taken, then progressed only when confirmation arrived that they were clear. He moved his warriors in disciplined kill-teams, their stalk-tanks and ’strider units dispersed to repel, with maximum force and response time mobility, any sudden ambush.

&nb
sp; came the cant. Never a particularly fervent believer, Echo-Echo-71 nevertheless felt holiness suffuse him at the inloaded voice. He was doing the Omnissiah’s work, and leading his warriors in the service of Sacred Mars.

  All was proceeding apace until the tunnel through which they marched ended abruptly. They had long ago branched off into the true webway rather than the Mechanicum’s purpose-built avenues, and now found themselves facing a tunnel that continued on the map, yet appeared blunted before their eye-lenses.

  It ended in golden mist. The advance scouts had entered and immediately fallen silent. Quite what this portended, Echo-Echo-71 couldn’t be sure.

  He sent in one of his ’striders, warning the female pilot to be high-sense aware and cant back a continual datastream. She vowed obedience, lurched forwards on her spindly legged dune walker as she began exloading a code-flow of perception data, and entered the mist.

  Whereupon she immediately fell silent.

  Echo-Echo-71 considered this. The Archimandrite’s cartography may have been flawed through inexperience or the vicissitudes of this unnatural realm. The original source may have also been flawed, given that the Unifiers focused their efforts on constructing their own routes to link with the established webway rather than wandering significant distances and recording alternate routes. Archival data showed that such scouting expeditions had been part of the initial steps of the Great Work, but such practices ended with the devastating manifestation of Magnus the Red, and the deployment of the Ten Thousand and Silent Sisterhood to defend the Mechanicum labourers.

  Whatever the truth, whether out of date or recorded incorrectly to begin with, his map was unreliable.

  None of these musings solved Echo-Echo-71’s conundrum. Retreating and reconsidering the route would mean deviation from the Archimandrite’s plan. Advancing along the unmodified route would mean venturing into this anomaly through which there was no evidence of survival, let alone drawing nearer to his goal.