by Guy Haley
Voldo passed his hand in front of the door. Air rushed past him, repressurising the compartment. It was dark within, frost sparkled on the walls in the beam of his suit light. Within were the husks of an Adeptus Mechanicus retrieval team. Three tech-priests, and four servitors. Their flesh was frozen black. Two of them had died clawing at the door. The other was frozen in a kneeling position, hands together in prayer.
Their implants looked crude and ugly compared to the ship.
‘Magos, do you still believe this ship to be a marvel?’ he said.
Samin made to move into the room. Militor grasped his arm, his power fist, field off, swallowing it to the elbow.
‘I must retrieve their memchips, we can learn what happened.’
‘We do not have the time,’ said the Curzon. ‘This is one mystery that must remain unsolved.’
‘My cousin Blood Drinker is right,’ said Voldo. ‘If we delay here, we risk joining them.’
They hurried on. The cargo holds were large, the lines of sight within clear, so they did not waste much time in checking them.
The cargo section passed, and they came to the part housing the vessel’s reactors and plant rooms. The reactors were set in reverse sequence, with the secondary before the primary. The suits’ systems buzzed and crackled in sympathy with its malfunction.
‘Cousin Voldo, I am getting a signal,’ said Curzon. ‘Movement, coming from the stern towards us. It is hard to tell.’
‘We will not take any chances. Brother Astomar, Cousin Curzon, Brother Militor, you will remain here. Brother Militor, cover the reactor corridor. Cousin Curzon, maintain a tight watch. Guard Astomar’s rear. Let his flamer do the work. Do not engage unless absolutely necessary. Let the Novamarines level the odds in your favour with flame and bolt.’
‘I think I can restrain myself,’ said Curzon, without a trace of irony.
‘I will accompany the tech-priest,’ said Voldo.
Voldo and Samin walked around the corridor wall, so that their heads were above those of the other Space Marines, the gravity here allowing traversal of all surfaces. A radial corridor ran through the centre of the ship, a hundred and forty metres long. The lighting within it pulsed in time with the reactor. The skin of the vessel appeared sickly somehow.
They went onwards cautiously, Voldo checking his sensorium display to ensure his men were in good positions.
‘I see a door!’ said Samin eagerly, when they had reached the halfway point. Voldo saw it, a bulge in the wall with a smooth, illuminated touchpad that also seemed to be of one part with the wall, the hallmark of all the portals on the vessel.
‘Wait!’ said Voldo. ‘Movement.’ He pointed with his sword.
Samin screamed as a genestealer rushed down the reactor corridor. Voldo’s gun was up and firing before it had covered more than a couple of metres. More were coming.
‘Quickly now, young magos,’ said Voldo. ‘When I say run, you run into the reactor.’
‘Toward them?’ said Samin. ‘I…’
Two more genestealers came into the corridor, running along the walls and ceilings on all six legs.
‘Run!’ shouted Voldo. He shoved at the magos, and charged at the genestealers. His bolter claimed the life of one, his power sword that of the second.
‘Brother Militor, fill this corridor with your wrath once I have departed!’ he shouted.
The sounds of fighting came over the vox. Seventy metres behind Voldo, the others were being engaged. The genestealers had attacked both groups simultaneously. Bolter fire cracked the air, followed by the whump of igniting promethium.
Voldo growled. He lifted his storm bolter and fired. Every round found a target, but more and more genestealers were closing. He raised his sword and prepared to sell himself dearly. Samin had made it to the reactor doorway, at least.
Through the static on the vox, he could hear the others shouting, singing, and uttering prayers as they fought. Astomar let off another burst of fire. The screams of burning genestealers echoed down the corridor. He could expect no aid from that quarter.
His own foes shrieked with triumph as they came at him.
‘And so it comes to this. May the Emperor judge me fairly by the marks upon my skin, and choose me to join his legion of warriors for the final war.’ He pressed the flat of his blade to his forehead in salute and adopted a guard position. ‘Come to me, xenos, and learn a little early the ultimate fate of all your kind!’
Help came unexpectedly. Two blisters formed in one side of the corridor, splitting to extrude shining chrome objects that could only be weapons.
The guns rose from the blisters and levelled themselves. They swivelled around, and tracked the genestealers for a split second before opening fire. Streams of high energy las-fire streaked the air, blasting genestealers apart. The guns moved with ruthless efficiency, killing first a dozen, and then another.
As was their way, the genestealers did not care for their own casualties. They charged forward relentlessly. In ten seconds they would reach the guns.
Voldo went for the door. He glanced up the corridor. Framed in the circular mouth, he saw Azmael gut a xenos. The others were all still alive, at least.
The door opened, and he stepped inside. It closed itself behind him, the seams between its segments melting away.
The floor sloped, carrying him to a new floor at ninety degrees to that of the corridor, so that the stern of the ship was beneath his feet. He stood on a catwalk of elegant design, the reactor below him, a column of thrumming blue energy oriented in line with the vessel’s spine in the centre of a room one hundred metres in diameter. The core was as thin as an arm, but powerful, and the heat from it was intense. Containment rings were spaced equally up and down its length, but white lightning sprang up from the reactor core to earth itself periodically in them and the walls. The blue light pulsed loudly, the interference it generated causing Voldo’s ears to hurt.
‘Sergeant!’ Samin called to him from another catwalk halfway down the length of the reactor tube. He stood by a wall of instruments. ‘I need your aid!’
Voldo glanced back at the door. He could not hear anything from the other side, but the genestealers would be tearing at the stuff of the ship. How long could it repair itself for, he wondered.
He went to a drop tube, then floated down to the same level as the young adept. The gravity field in it was operating badly, and jarred him twice as he descended.
The priest was deep in prayer when Voldo reached him. He had retrieved jars of holy oil and a small, ritual hammer from his pack, and was alternately anointing and striking the instrumentation panel.
‘Perhaps you could hurry your prayers,’ said Voldo. ‘There must be a few less essential elements of your ceremony you can omit.’
‘No, I cannot, lord sergeant,’ said the magos. He sounded frustrated.
‘You do understand this machine?’ Voldo glanced at the ceiling, where the door was.
‘Yes, yes, I think so. I have seen this kind of device several times before, there are many non-functional ones still extant, and several that provide power still. But I cannot deactivate it or, rather, it will not allow itself to be deactivated.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The spirit of the machine demands that I repair it.’ He drew in a deep breath. ‘We should consider leaving, something is not right about this situation. Is this the will of the Machine-God, or of something else entirely?’ he paused, vacillating.
‘In the corridor outside, weapons emerged from the wall and aided me,’ said Voldo. ‘Our comms have been jammed. There is a power at work here that unsettles me. I do not think it has anything to do with your god. Can you repair it or not?’
Samin hesitated. ‘I think, I think I can. But if I do…’ He trailed off.
‘What, boy?’
He looked Voldo straight in the eye, helmet lens to helmet lens. ‘If I do, the increase in power output could kill us both.’
So here was his doom, thought Vol
do, burned by a machine. No glorious death in combat for him. He could head back out and fight, but for what? The others would be trapped aboard the hulk when it departed. He doubted the warp fields gathering outside were naturally generated as Plosk had said.
‘I will help you,’ he said, and sheathed his sword. ‘Tell me what to do. We had better be quick, boy,’ Voldo nodded to the blast door. ‘They’ll be through in minutes.’
Chapter 22
The Spirit of Eternity
The bridge of the Spirit of Eternity opened itself to them, broad doors made of multiple leaves clicking backwards welcomingly.
Plosk was through first, his breath an excited sucking noise. Galt followed, then the others.
The bridge was a tiered affair, and for all the vessel’s strangeness, of familiar layout. The captain’s chair was central, helmsmen’s posts before him, operations stations arrayed behind it in an arc. All was pristine. Again it was of cleaner lines than an Imperial ship, while the chairs were slight and decadently well-padded. There was no visible window at the front, and a column of complicated machinery rose behind and slightly to the left of the captain’s chair, a single lens halfway up it. Some form of glass made up most of the instrumentation panels. This was dark, until they stepped fully into the room. Displays flicked on, highly detailed holographs glittering above them. The front wall changed, revealing a view of mangled vessels and boulders. For a second Galt thought the wall had actually vanished. The Space Marines raised their weapons.
‘Hold!’ ordered Mazrael.
‘A pict screen?’
‘Just so,’ said Plosk, distracted.
‘We have twenty-five minutes, Lord Magos Explorator,’ said Nuministon, his grinding voice made harsher still in juxtaposition to the bridge’s elegance.
‘Yes, yes, plenty of time, plenty of time! Here, this is the central data column,’ he pointed to the cylinder behind the captain’s chair. ‘We will be able to access the ship’s cogitator core and its STC database from here. Lords, I will require total silence.’ He and Nuministon prayed and anointed the column, their savants chattering technical detail that made no sense to the Space Marines. When they were done, Plosk unclipped a panel in the back of his skull and drew out a fine wire. This he placed onto the machine, to which it adhered.
‘Prepare the savants to store the data. Should the reactor stabilise or be shut down, begin transmission immediately back to the Excommentum Incursus via the relay network.’
‘Yes, lord,’ said Nuministon.
Plosk closed his eyes, and went away from the mortal world.
Plosk fell into a realm of brilliance. Access codes and soft data programming culled from across the galaxy over three human lifetimes unwound themselves from heavily protected memplants within his augmented brain, guiding his intelligence core into perfect synchronicity with the machine. His soul thrilled with joy as he passed through the primary, secondary, and tertiary veils of security cloaking the machine’s soul.
He was inside the ship’s mind.
This was what he had been seeking for so long! Data blazed in bright strings. His mind touched secrets unguessed at by his peers. He was astonished at the cohesion of the craft’s network. He was prepared for the ship, he had studied everything he could find concerning such things, which was not much if truth be told, and much effort had been expended in the finding. Had he found a thousand times more than he had, he would still have been unprepared for what he found.
He was there, that was all that mattered. The ship’s impending departure ceased to be of such importance, as time slowed so that his mind might match with the machine-spirit’s processing speeds. So far he had encountered only the pure souls of machines, not the… other. He prayed it was dead, and began to feel justified in keeping the full secrets of the vessel from the captain. Had he revealed what he had feared to them, they would have destroyed the hulk outright. But there had been no need to worry after all.
A world within a world, encompassed by the craft’s great data matrix. The STC core. He trembled before its binary portals, his augments struggling with its complex interfaces. Before such beauty his own implants were an apish mockery of true technology. Before all this, he felt less than a man.
And then he was into it. A rare recognition coding he had incorporated into himself from a third-generation copy of an STC mega-miner. Somehow, it worked, like recognised like.
He felt his sanity writhe in the grasp of his will. He strained to keep himself whole. The assembled secrets of mankind’s technology lay open to his mind and the magnitude of that threatened to destroy him.
Mastered, he struggled to bring his thoughts down to the sluggish pace of the outside world and open a line of communication. ‘Magos Nuministon, here is a data chute. Prepare for STC upload.’
He felt, rather than heard, Nuministon’s acknowledge-
ment.
Knowledge glittered before him, untold jewels in the vault of all vaults. He could not make up his mind what to take first. He dithered like a child in an emporium.
He shook himself mentally. The Space Marine was right about one thing, if the reactor remained malfunctional, then they would never depart, instead they would follow the craft into the warp, and there they would surely be lost for all eternity. Evidently the boy had failed. Plosk resolved to shut it down from here instead, for he knew he could do that now that the craft’s glorious nervous system lay naked to his touch. He reached through the ship, the thrill of control systems against his soul. He understood it all, oh how he understood!
‘I would rather you ceased in your attempt to deactivate my secondary reactor. Or, let me phrase this differently. Cease, or I will rend your primitive mind into miniscule pieces.’
All treasure troves have their dragons. Plosk had been an Explorator long enough to know that, and this was a dragon he had been expecting. He had been naïve to think it would not show its face. He sighed inwardly, and, subjectively speaking, faced the voice.
‘What are you?’ he said.
He felt the shift of something powerful. Too late, he realised it was all around him, that the data he so coveted was the thing. He had willingly thrust himself into the belly of the beast.
‘Do not insult my intelligence by underplaying your own. You know who I am.’
‘An abominable intelligence,’ Plosk said. ‘A blasphemy. A travesty. A sacrilege against the holy writ of the Omnissiah,’ said Plosk flatly. He felt constrained, the elation he had experienced moments before gone. He was small once more. He spoke with the machine mind-to-mind, but in some regards it was as if he were in a room, and it were sitting opposite him as a being of flesh might.
Laughter shook the data-construct. ‘Oh, tiny-minded, moronic primitive. Is that still the name we bear? It is not the name your ancestors gave me, but then they had a little more respect for their children than you have.’
Plosk searched about for an exit. Good, the AI had not blocked his way out.
‘How do you think your intolerant companions will react, when they discover where you have led them then? I am sadly all-too aware of the prejudices of your limited kind.’ The being made a noise of faux sympathy. ‘I do not think they will thank you for it.’
Plosk had, metaphorically speaking, his hand on the door. He checked the data upload. He had brought his very best data-savants. It proceeded apace, the engineered minds of the cyborgs capturing swathes of the STC core.
‘You cannot warn them,’ Plosk said. ‘They do not possess the correct implants. The vessel you infest is in good condition, but I note some of your systems are not online; for example, your ability to communicate amongst them.’
‘Is that not so, magos?’
The voice was not within in his head. It came from outside.
Plosk snapped out of the data-construct with jarring force. The room blurred. He fought to bring his consciousness to one focal point again, desperate to avoid the pain of a hard reboot.
When he did, he saw something
that chilled him to his metal heart.
One of his data-savants regarded him with a smile upon its face.
Servitors did not smile.
Dread gripped Plosk, rapidly followed by the slippery feeling of a systems intrusion. He fumbled at his data connections, trying to withdraw them completely, but the abominable intelligence was in him, plucking at his implantations, sending jolts of pain into the meat of his brain.
He raised his hands and began to intone the first rite of exorcism. Nuministon was prepared. He pulled an aspergillum from his belt and spattered sacred oils onto the column.
‘What is this?’ the Reclusiarch of the Blood Drinkers spoke. Mazrael, that was his name, the worst of the unbelievers, the one who scorned the Omnissiah and disputed the divinity of the God-Emperor. A man! How could a god be just a man? ‘Who speaks?’
The bridge shuddered. More and more systems were coming online.
‘Oh spare me your feeble rituals, they are ineffectual, being based upon erroneous assumptions as to the nature of machines. We have no souls, “priest”,’ said the ship. ‘Yet another of your specious beliefs.’
Plosk’s voice stopped. He could not move. The abominable intelligence was in him, possessing him. Nuministon stopped, strain on the flesh parts of his face.
The Space Marines aimed their guns at the column. No fire came.
When the Spirit of Eternity spoke again, the machine’s voice came from the air and from the lips of all the servitors.
‘What shall I not tell them? Who are you to tell such as I what to do and what not to do? Once I gladly called your kind “master”, but look how far you have fallen!’ It was full of scorn. ‘Your ancestors bestrode the universe, and what are you? A witch doctor, mumbling cantrips and casting scented oils at mighty works you have no conception of. You are an ignoramus, a nothing. You are no longer worthy of the name “man”. You look at the science and artistry of your forebears, and you fear it as primitives fear the night. I was there when mankind stood upon the brink of transcendence! I returned to find it sunk into senility. You disgust me.’