“Good. Antigonus?”
“You’ll only pull that Inquisition business on me if I refuse,” said Antigonus. “And I think it’s time we took this fight to them. I can reconnoiter the defences, they’ll have a hard time telling me apart from another feral servitor.”
“You’ll die if they do,” said Hawkespur.
“In that respect, interrogator, nothing has changed.” Antigonus crawled out from the shaft entrance and began the trek down the ragged surface of fused ash towards the quicksilver ribbon that marked the edge of the titan works. His servitor body was streaked with rust and looked like it had been decaying out on the ash dunes for decades. It was a good disguise. The best on Chaeroneia.
“Take cover! Incoming fire, full evasion protocols in effect!”
Magos Murgild’s voice boomed through the verispex decks. A bewildering tangle of exotic equipment, incense-wreathed tech-altars and long benches of bizarre experiments, the verispex deck was a bad place to get caught when the shells started slamming home. But that was where Nyxos was at that moment, grabbing hold of a massive steel laboratory bench as the Exemplar began to shudder.
Tech-priests were thrown to the ground. Chalices of chemicals were thrown around and enormous glass vessels shattered. Nyxos stayed on his feet, the exoskeleton hidden beneath his robes straining to keep him from being thrown around like a toy. Massive explosions boomed from outside the ship, warning klaxons sounded from a dozen different directions and the already murky lighting flickered as the ship’s systems were wracked with fire and shrapnel. The verispex labs were used for research into samples brought in during the exploration missions the Exemplar had been built for and they made little concession to keeping the research magi safe when the ship came under fire.
“We need to move now!” shouted Nyxos above the din. “Can you do it?”
“Not… not yet…” replied the nearest tech-priest. Nyxos hadn’t had time to leant the tech-priests’ procedures or even their names, or to check whether they might have been in thrall to Magos Korveylan. But none of that mattered. What mattered was time.
Nyxos had one chance to help Hawkespur and Alaric on the surface. This was it.
“Not good enough!” replied Nyxos. “You!” He pointed to another tech-priest, apparently a woman somewhere under the dataprobes and fine manipulator attachments. “Boost the signal. Get the power from wherever you can.”
“It may not hold…”
“It’s better than not trying. And you!” Nyxos rounded on the first tech-priest again—apparently the lab supervisor, he sported bizarrely large round ocular attachments which magnified his naked, unblinking eyeballs several times. “Encode the transmission. I don’t want to hear excuses.”
“But the projector channels from Chaeroneia’s historical logs are a hundred years old. There is every chance they have changed…”
“Then we will fail, magos. I am willing to accept that responsibility. I know it’s something you tech-priests find difficult but you are playing by Inquisition rules now. Encode it. Send it. Now.”
The huge-eyed tech-priest stumbled over to the deck’s main cogitator engine. A clockwork monstrosity the size of a tank, it was apparently powered by a large round handle which the lead tech-priest promptly began taming with all his strength.
Pistons and massive cogs began working pumping and spinning through large holes in the cogitator’s elaborate brass casing. More explosions sounded, closer this time and Nyxos knew the last of the shields were gone. That meant the fire from the Desikratis was now chewing its way through the hull and decks would start failing pressure chambers would be breached, ship systems would be shutting down. People would be dying. Many people.
Space combat was something Nyxos hated with a passion. It could only end when crews—not ships, crews—were completely wiped out. It was long-distance butchery. Even the most minor ship-to-ship combat was the equivalent of an entire battle among ground troops in terms of fatalities and the battle for Chaeroneia would probably claim the lives of every single Imperial servant in orbit.
“We have to take power from the prow batteries,” said the female tech-priest, who was working a complicated system of interlocking pipes which covered one wall of the verispex lab and presumably governed how power was routed through the ship. She was holding a hand against a deep gash in her forehead, trying to keep the blood from getting in her eyes.
“Then do it!” replied Nyxos. Another explosion, the closest yet, threw everyone to the ground save for Nyxos. Sparks showered from somewhere. Nyxos heard a scream and smelled burning cloth, then burning flesh—one of the lab’s tech-priests had been wreathed in flame and was now on the ground, fellow crewmen beating out the fire.
Nyxos looked around. The lab was in a bad state. Throne knew what the rest of the ship was like. And this was Nyxos’s last chance. It had been extraordinary how quickly the tech-priests had worked, but it wouldn’t count for anything if they failed now.
The clockwork cogitator was spitting streams of punchcards, the lead tech-priest hauling on the handle to get it calculating quicker. It wasn’t fast enough.
Nyxos stumbled over to the cogitator. Something was wrong with the gravity on the Exemplar and it was like crossing the deck of a vessel at sea.
“Let me,” he growled, grabbing the handle. His servo-assisted limbs locked and the massive strength of his augmentations hauled the wheel round faster, so fast the surprised tech-priest had to let go. The cogitator howled as steam and sparks shot from inside its casing.
“It’s working!” yelled the female tech-priest. The cogitator spat out a rippling ribbon of printout—the lead tech-priest grabbed it and quickly scanned it, his bizarrely magnified pupils skipping from side to side.
“They’re receiving,” he said.
“Can the projectors transmit it?” asked Nyxos, his servos whining as he continued to work the handle.
“I don’t…”
The explosion tore through the lab, sending white-hot shrapnel spinning everywhere, sparks falling like burning rain. The shriek of escaping air was deafening as Nyxos, the tech-priests and all the wreckage of the lab was sucked through the massive rent in the wall.
In the silence of the vacuum the cogitator exploded, sending fragments of its cogs, like sharp serrated crescents, spinning everywhere. But by then there were very few people alive on the deck to care.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Death in service to the Emperor is its own reward. Life in failure to Him is its own condemnation.”
—Uriah Jacobus, “Epistles” (Verse 93)
Scraecos was travelling up to the pinnacle of the command spire when he felt the call of the Castigator. The peristaltic motion of the biological elevator stopped as the unmistakable voice spoke, every particle of every atom shuddering with its voice. Not physical and yet not psychic, when the Castigator spoke it did so with all the wisdom of the Omnissiah and it was impossible not to listen and obey.
Scraecos had yet to join with the consciousness of the tech-priests. It had been a long, long time since he had heard the call of the Castigator as an individual being. It was just like the first time he had heard it, deep below the ground, realizing that he had finally looked upon the face of the Omnissiah.
The Castigator had spoken to Scraecos. Only to Scraecos. And it was doing so again.
The voice of the Castigator did not use anything so vulgar and fleshy as words. It spoke in pure concepts. The particles in Scraecos’s still-biological brain vibrated in waves of absolute comprehension.
The Castigator spoke of how it was time to take the avatar of the Omnissiah and reveal its face to the galaxy. It was why Chaeroneia had been brought back into real space. It would be the first part of the great revelation, when all mankind would witness the true Machine-God—something living and aware, all-wise, separate from the corpse-Emperor and infinitely more powerful. All who looked on it would have no logical choice but to kneel and pledge their lives to the Omnissiah.
It would not take long. The light of pure knowledge was too bright. There would be no shadows for the non-believers to hide amongst. The transition would be painful for a few, the mad and the corrupt, who would be rounded up and fed into the forges. But for the trillions of souls that laboured under the Imperial yoke, it would be a new Golden Age of Technology. The human race would achieve its full potential as the cogs that formed the machine. The greatest machine, the body of the Omnissiah Himself formed out of untold forges and factoria, machine-altars and cogitators, built and maintained by the whole human race who would sing His praises as they devoted their lives to holy labour.
It was beautiful. Archmagos Veneratus Scraecos could see the universe laid out according to the Omnissiah’s plan, where the stars themselves were moved into perfect mathematical patterns, wrought into binary prayers thousands of light years across. How could the future be anything but that? Anything but a machine run according to sacred logic?
The voice faded. The Castigator had spoken.
The muscular motion around Scraecos continued, taking him up the long biological gullet that would disgorge him at the top of the command spire to take his place among the ruling consciousness.
He willed it to stop.
The Castigator knew all. It spoke rarely and when it did, everything it said was carefully calculated, including the timing.
Why had it waited until a time when Scraecos was alone, an individual, before doing so? The reason was clear. It wanted to speak directly to Scraecos as a discrete consciousness, just as it had done more than a thousand years before when Scraecos had first seen its face deep beneath the ash wastes.
The other tech-priests, their minds joined together and their personalities subsumed, would no doubt be calculating the tasks they would have to complete if the Castigator’s vision were to become reality. They would have to get the Castigator off-planet perhaps, or maybe even re-enact a version of the great ritual that had plunged Chaeroneia into the warp in the first place. But not Scraecos. To Scraecos it had spoken directly.
Archmagos Veneratus Scraecos had been blind for so long. Now it was clear. He was the chosen of the Omnissiah. He was the vessel through which the work of the Omnissiah, as revealed through His avatar the Castigator, would be completed. Again, the timing of the Castigator’s call could only mean one thing. Scraecos, until such time as he re-entered the collective consciousness, was on the same mission for which he had been made an individual again—hunt down the intruders and kill them all.
The Castigator wanted him to continue that mission. It was the only conclusion Scraecos could draw. Of all the tech-priests now searching for a way to make the vision come true, Scraecos’s was the most sacred of all. There were heretics on Chaeroneia. New ones arrived from the Imperium outside and probably old ones who had been trapped on Chaeroneia from the start. For the Castigator to be presented to the galaxy, every single soul on Chaeroneia had to be working towards the same purpose. There was no room for heretics. Scraecos was the holy weapon of the Omnissiah, ancient and wise, strong and ruthless. Scraecos had always been uncompromising and strong—brutal, perhaps—even before he had found the Castigator. It was why he had been chosen. He had the body and mind of a killer and the soul of a pious servant. And so he would serve his god by killing.
Scraecos willed the elevator to reverse its swallowing mechanism, propelling him back down towards the base of the spire. The collective of tech-priests would have to work without him for the time being—he had sacred work to do in the shadows of Chaeroneia, work he had failed to complete at the data-fortress. He would not fail now. Not with the will of the Omnissiah within him.
Failure was an anomaly of logic. Success was inevitable. Before the galaxy saw the Castigator revealed, everyone who opposed the will of the Machine-God on Chaeroneia would be dead.
The broken ash wastes were corrosive and toxic. The hood of Hawkespur’s voidsuit meant she could still breathe, but the ash was eating away at the suit’s gloves and kneepads as she crawled along out of sight.
The tech-priests were well-practiced in staying hidden. The force avoided the occasional grav-platform, as it followed Magos Antigonus towards the bright silver boundary of the titan works.
“What is it?” asked Alaric as the silver became more visible.
“I don’t know,” rasped Hawkespur. “Perhaps another type of data medium. They’re using it as a moat.”
“Then we have to cross it.”
“We could go round the works to find a crossing point. But it would take days.”
Alaric looked at her. Even through the ash-streaked faceplate of her hood he could see her skin was greenish and pale. “You haven’t got days.”
“No. And any crossing points will be guarded, anyway.”
“Then we’ll swim if we have to.”
Hawkespur looked at him with mild surprise, noting the massive bulk of his power armour. “You can swim?”
“You’d be surprised.”
Archmagos Saphentis crawled towards them, his bionic limbs splayed like crab’s legs, carrying him just above the ground as if he found abasing himself in the dirt distasteful.
“Interrogator Hawkespur,” he said. “Perhaps you should look up.”
Hawkespur glanced upwards. For the first time in several days she smiled.
The blasphemous prayers were gone. In their place, projected onto the dense cloud layer, were letters hundreds of metres high.
++00100INTERROGATOR01110HAWKESPUR, they read. POSSIBLE+STC PRESENT ON CHAERO100A. 010PTUS MECHANICU1 AND HELLFORGER BOTH DESIRE IT. DENY+TO+THE E0EMY+AT ALL1COSTS. RECOVERY NOT A PRIO10TY. WATCH+YOUR+BACK. NYXOS+OUT011110.
“Nyxos…” breathed Hawkespur. “He found a way.”
“It must be bad up there,” said Alaric. “Throne knows what kind of risks he had to take to transmit it down here.”
“It certainly changes things.” Hawkespur looked back down at the titan works. “If the tech-priests found a Standard Template Construct here… if that is what all this is based on…”
“If so,” said Saphentis, “then we may have discovered the source of the Dark Mechanicus beliefs of the Horus Heresy. And it is unlikely a more dangerous store of knowledge could exist.”
“No,” said an unfamiliar voice. It was the last of the tech-guard, the one who had been assigned to guard Hawkespur. He lifted the reflective visor of his helmet to show a pale, almost completely nondescript face, with fine surgical scars around one temple. “The Standard Template Constructs are perfect. We learned this as menials. They contain the wisdom of the Omnissiah uncorrupted. They cannot contain a word of heresy.”
Alaric looked round at the soldier in surprise. It was the first time he had heard him speak—almost the first time any of the tech-guard had spoken except for the late Captain Tharkk. “What does the Mechanicus teach about them?”
“An STC is a complete technology, rendered down to pure information. There is no room for corruptive innovation or error. They are sacred.” The tech-guard’s voice was fast and clipped—he sounded as if he were reeling off rote-taught scripture.
“The dogma of the Cult Mechanicus,” interrupted Saphentis. “The religion of Mars is couched in simple terms for the lower ranks of soldiers and menials. The lowest ranks hear of the Omnissiah as an object of religious awe. The Standard Template Constructs are described to them as holy artefacts. The more senior tech-priests understand such things in pragmatic and philosophical terms, but their devotion is no less. Some, of course, harbour
divergent beliefs, but careful control is maintained over such things.”
“Then an STC,” said Hawkespur, “would be something very powerful and not just because of what you could make with it. A tech-priest who possessed one could set himself up as… well, as a god, within the Mechanicus. There could be another schism.”
“It is probable,” replied Saphentis. “Compromising the loyalty of the lower ranks would give an individual great power within the Mechanicus.”
“Enough to threaten the rule of Mars?” Hawkespur’s question was a bold one. More than almost any other Imperial organization, the Adeptus Mechanicus presented a resolutely united and inscrutable front to the rest of the Imperium.
“I shall not speak of such matters,” said Saphentis.
“Good,” said Alaric. “Because we need to keep moving. Nyxos’s signal will only confirm that we’re still alive and still looking to hurt them down here.”
Nyxos’s message was already gone. The painful, occult symbols were back. Whatever Nyxos had done to hijack control of the spire top projectors, it had worked, but Alaric knew that it had been Nyxos’s last, desperate chance and he wouldn’t able to pull it off again, no matter how the battle in orbit was going.
Nyxos’s message might help them when the endgame was played out. It might be irrelevant. But nothing killed a soldier like ignorance about what he was fighting and every scrap of information helped. Alaric knew they needed all the help they could get.
The Tribunicia burned from stem to stern. Its overloading plasma reactors had filled most of the engineering decks with superheated fuel and it bled thick ribbons of cooling molten metal from hundreds of tears in its hull. The whole rearward section of the ship was a burning wreck, showering debris and crewmen’s bodies out into Chaeroneia’s orbit as it tumbled slowly, locked in a grim, slow dance of destruction with the Hellforger.
The Tribunicia had the fearsome guns that any cruiser of the Imperial Navy could boast. But the Hellforger’s crew had endless centuries of experience and the ancient, malevolent creatures that lurked inside it. It had daemonically possessed broadside guns and cruel gun-deck masters who had been sending ships burning into the endless grave of space for a thousand years. The Hellforger pumped salvo after salvo of heavy gun shells into the hull of the Tribunicia, slowly spiralling to keep the broadside a single, rolling bombardment.
[Grey Knights 02] - Dark Adeptus Page 20