by Ian Watson
‘Yus, sah.’ Thunderjug stomped over to his troopers and bellowed at them for a while.
‘Couldn’t one of them scoop up the boy?’ suggested Grimm.
‘They’d probably tear his head off by mistake,’ snapped Hachard.
‘Um... Commander, sir.’
‘What is it now, abhuman?’
‘Isn’t a charge by the ogryns a mite suicidal?’
‘Not necessarily,’ intervened Serpilian. ‘The robot replied to fire with fire. But the ogryn charge might confuse it. I take it that that’s the commander’s intention, rather than him implying that his hands are being tied.’
‘Huh,’ said Grimm.
Thunderjug returned and stood to attention.
JOMI CLUNG TO the ground in terror as the air blistered above him.
‘They’ll need to change their tactics,’ advised the voice. ‘A lull must come – and I think I can cause a diversion. When I say run, sprint to me as fast as you can, ducking low. I can take you inside this body. I can transport you back through the portal. Better the warp than death, don’t you think?’
The sizzle of lethal beams almost convinced Jomi. Almost.
‘I shall save you, Jomi, save you. I am your safety...’
The voice began to drone hypnotically, bewitchingly. It promised joys, it promised lusts, fulfilments – yet seemed savagely bewildered as to what these might be. Did Jomi hear a background hint of crazed laughter? His body twitched, puppet-like. He threw up his hand reflexively, and a low, stray laser beam seared his wrist superficially. The pain jerked him free from the growing enchantment, plunging him again into a tenain of terrible fear.
‘Are you man or woman?’ he gasped.
‘I hardly remember.’
‘How can you not remember such a thing?’
‘It became unimportant... Yet a ghost reminds me of the flesh! A goading wraith within. Ah, Jomi, Jomeeee, I know so much, and am so separated from all that I knew. My ghost cries for a body to carets and sculpt to its desire... Come to me soon, Jomeeee, when I call—’
FROM THE VOICE’S moaning words Serpilian gathered ample confirmation that its owner had been a psychic eavesdropper on millennia of war-torn history and even of hidden pre-Imperium history. How the inquisitor thirsted for its knowledge.
But the ancient survivor was also, he strongly suspected, possessed.
Possessed by a daemon of the warp.
This was an unusual species of possession, for the survivor plainly owned no body at all, other than the vast metal body of the robot. The survivor consisted only of mind, wrought within a talisman of crystal wafers or some other occult material, a talisman which strove to maintain the stability of that mind – strove with a fair degree of success, considering the awesome timespan, yet of necessity imperfectly. The daemon had no tangible flesh to twist and warp and stamp its mark upon. It could only lurk impotently, glued to the imprisoned mind, tormenting it spasmodically by stimulating memories and sensuous hallucinations. Maybe the goad of the daemon was what had prevented the survivor from lapsing into sloth...
The voice spoke of science. The truth was corruption. Conclusio: its science was heresy.
Serpilian must not thirst for that!
And now that the castaway’s dark scheme to possess Jomi had failed – a cursed, daemon-inspired plan! – the survivor was intent on at least carrying the boy back into exile with it.
At Hachard’s command the Grief Bringers ceased fire...
JUST AS THE ogryn squad was commencing its assault, the robot aimed a plasma blast low at the grox compound, crisping several beasts yet also tearing a long gap in the fence. Serpilian sensed the aura of venomous intent which the mind in the robot – daemon-assisted? – directed at the reptiles to stir their blood lust.
Ripping at one another, groxen burst free of their captivity and rapidly were attracted towards the thundering giants. All plasma and laser fire had ceased. The psyker boy staggered erect and stumbled towards the robot; seeing which, Serpilian let out a cry of frustration.
‘Catch that lad for the Emperor, Thunderjug!’ shouted Grimm, as if he was a commander. ‘And don’t pull his head off unless you have to!’
No appeal could mean more to an ogryn. Tossing his encumbering ripper gun aside, Thunderjug Aggrox bared his tusks and pounded towards the distant youth. The dapper little squat sprinted after the ogryn, trying his best to keep up, panting, ‘Huh! Huh! Huh!’
Careless of his own safety, Serpilian loped after them, blood-red cloak streaming, the very image of avenging angel. The boy must be stopped! A hatch was opening in the lower casing of the robot to welcome the lurching youth.
Just then, the stampeding groxen met the charging ogryns. The insensate animals leapt, clawed, bit, and gouged. They tore chunks of flesh, yet an ogryn hardly heeded such trivia. Ogryn fists smashed grox skulls.
However, the robot noticed the boy’s pursuers and swivelled a weapon arm, opening fire with a raking of explosive bolts. Serpilian dived flat. Ahead of him, the ogryn’s mighty legs pounded onward for a dozen more strides before the giant crashed to the ground. The squat darted past; his cap had fallen off, or been snatched away by a bolt. Then a blast grenade, launched from a tube in the robot’s arm, exploded near him. The shock wave picked the squat up and threw him several metres.
Sprawled on the stony dirt, Serpilian stretched out his right arm, forefinger pointing the jokaero needler. One needle in the boy, and he would be paralyzed. The range was somewhat extreme for such a tiny, lightweight dart. The target was moving. The inquisitor strove to aim.
At that moment, when Jomi was barely twenty metres from the inviting hatch, he halted...
A PSYCHIC MAELSTROM of savagery and pain whirled around Jomi. The death-shrieks of those who had died, the berserker fury of ogryns as they fought the reptiles, the terror of all the energy beams and explosions... these suddenly culminated. A lurid radiance seemed to flare in his mind, as if doors were flying open, behind which fierce furnaces raged, cauldrons of inchoate energy.
‘Jomeeee! You’ve almost reached meee! Run just a little bit more and leap inside meee!’
Looking up at the towering machine, Jomi suddenly perceived it – by that blazing light from within him – not as a mountain of metal in approximately humanoid shape, but as...
...A VAST, NAKED Galandra Puschik looming over him lustfully. Her legs were squat trunks. The hatch was her secret opening. Her enormous torso, thick with fat, writhed with desire to entertain him. Her great muscular arms reached out...
‘Jomeeee! My dearest delicious boy, my joy—!’
What confronted him was a robot again. Yet the light from within him did not cease. It changed hue and wavelength, so that he peered appalled into the world of what-might-be...
ASSISTED BY A tentacle, he had leapt into a womb of steel, a metal pod barely large enough to stand up in. The tentacle withdrew, and he was thrown upon the floor as the robot rocked, starting to march back towards the portal, brushing aside the brawling bodies of brutal giants and rabid groxen. Its cleated feet crushed deep craters. The hatch was descending, to close him in. Through it, while still open, by the resuming, spasming light of energy beams Jomi glimpsed a man in glowing breastplate and blood-red cloak – a thin, tall man with a drooping black moustache and a staring eye tattooed upon his cheek – sprinting frantically towards the decamping robot.
Jomi could hear the man’s thumping thoughts. ‘Even if I can paralyze him... too late to drag the boy out...! At least cling to some handhold on the robot... Don’t lose it entirely, or all has been in vain... Accompany it, willy-nilly, through the doorway of darkness... Will there be air on the other side of the portal? Will all atmosphere have long since leaked out of the hulk? Will there be only vacuum, to boil my blood and collapse my lungs like empty paper bags? My energy armour will be no protection from that fate...’
The hatch closed, plunging Jomi into utter obscurity and silence. The body that carried him lurched and swayed.
<
br /> Presently little lights winked on. Jomi hugged his own body protectively. How could he escape from this pod? Surely he couldn’t live inside this miniature chamber even if the machine fed him? He imagined the narrow floor aswill with his urine, in which nuggets of excrement bobbed.
‘Welcome to my kingdom,’ the voice purred. Bitter mockery tinged the accents Jomi heard in his mind. ‘Our kingdom, now—’ (‘Mine tooo...’) A malicious, disappointed echo seemed to haunt the voice, perhaps unheard by it, perhaps all too familiar. (‘Failure, feeble failure... But here’s a soft body at least...’)
The lid of a small porthole slid aside. Jomi pressed his face to the thick plascrystal as floodlight beams lanced from the robot. He stared at a great grotto of metal, from which several steel tunnels ran away into stygian gloom. Strange machines jutted from the plated floor and from the ribbed walls. A debris of loose tools and cargo floated like dead fish in a dank pond.
‘There’s one other such machine as mine on board,’ the voice confided, as if oblivious of the soft, sinister echo that Jomi had heard. ‘It has been inactive for millennia, lacking a person’s mind to fill it, but I can revive it now. With my science, I’ll put you into it. First, of course, I’ll need to cut away your body—’
(‘That’ll be an exquisite hour or so...’)
Jomi vomited in terror.
‘—soon, before you use all the air I sucked in on that moon. Once you’re activated we can play games. Hide and seek, for instance... You’ll need to rely on the resources of your lovely mind. At least I’ll have company now. Oh the madness, the madness. Maybe my imaginary companion will go away. Into you, maybe...’
A figure in a blood-red cloak drifted into view, out in the giant grotto. Its frozen arms stretched out vainly towards a vista which, prior to the flare of illumination, it couldn’t possibly have seen...
WHAT-MIGHT-BE – and might still be – vanished. Jomi still stood before the robot.
‘Daemon, daemon, hidden daemon!’ he shrieked at it. He spat. Reaching into his memory for an incantation, he recalled Farb’s prayers, and howled:
‘Imperator hominorum, nostra salvatio!’
‘Jomeeeee! Do not betray meeee!’
The whitehot cauldron inside Jomi spilled over. The inner furnaces, so suddenly revealed to him, gushed psychic fire. Hardly knowing how, he sprayed a fountain of defensive mental energy, ill-focused yet incandescent, at the voice, which would have betrayed him.
‘Nostra salvatio, hominorum Imperator!’
‘Aiieee!’ cried the voice, keening through his head like a scalpel blade attempting to severe the sinews of his new-found psyker ability, raw and unshaped as yet.
Recoiling, his brain in agony, Jomi nevertheless summoned another spout of hot repulsion to hurl at the robot.
THE BOY’S RAW power! And his piety too, all be it born of terror! Bathed in the backwash of inner light from the volcanic upheaval within the boy, with his own senses extended Serpilian had partaken of Jomi’s vision of what-might-be.
As if an actor in Jomi’s dream, the inquisitor had experienced the death-agony of passing through the portal. Of collapsing lungs. Of utter, absolute chill... He had also known Jomi’s claustrophobic, dreadful dismay. Moments later Serpilian found himself still sprawled on the battlefield; and the battlefield was a blessed place by contrast.
Scrambling up, Serpilian signalled back towards Hachard, hoping that the Commander could see and would understand his gestures.Then he resumed his reckless run towards the boy who was holding the robot at bay, like a rat defying a bull. He no longer pointed his jokaero needler.
Casting his own aura of protection, Serpilian seized Jomi by the shoulder.
‘In the Emperor’s name, come with me to safety! Come swiftly, Jomi Jabal!’
HACHARD MUST HAVE understood. As soon as Serpilian had hauled the boy to some reasonable remove, and had ducked with him behind a boulder, the las-cannons of the Land Raiders opened fire. Shaft upon shaft of searing energy lanced at the robot. The Space Marine infantry added their contribution. Wounded ogryns scattered, abandoning the remaining groxen which had been preoccupying them.
Had the giants not engaged with the savage reptiles, by now one of those might have attacked Serpilian or the boy...
The robot launched jets of plasma and energy beams. A Land Raider exploded, raining hot shards of plasteel. Several Marines fell victim to beams and jets. The Imperial energies cascaded off the robot’s shields, pluming into the sky, rendering the landscape bright as day.
Yet now the robot seemed confused. It backed. It lumbered. Perhaps the mind within was anguished. Perhaps, infected by Jomi’s vision, it imagined that it had passed safely back through the portal, though the nightmare evidence was otherwise. Perhaps it was running low on energy.
At last an Imperial energy-beam tore loose a weapon arm. Another beam pierced the vulnerable hatch. Part of the robot’s mantle flared and melted. Still firing – but falteringly now, seemingly at random – the great, damaged machine stomped back towards the portal. Land Raider beams focused in unison upon its back, so that it seemed to be propelled in its retreat by a hurricane-torn, white-hot sail woven from the heart of a sun.
As it entered the portal, the robot incandesced blindingly. A detonation as of a dozen simultaneous sonic booms rocked the torn terrain. Glaring fragments of the robot’s carapace flew back like angry boomerangs, like scythes. The bulk of its disintegrating body pitched forward, out of existence, vanishing.
SERPILIAN DEACTIVATED HIS energy armour, and Jomi, smeared with dirt and stinking of sweat, wept in his arms. ‘I shall,’ vowed Serpilian, ‘recommend you for the finest training – as an inquisitor yourself.’
The boy cried, ‘What? What? I can’t hear! Only the awful terrible thunder.’
‘Your hearing will return!’ Serpilian shouted into the boy’s streaked face. ‘If not, that can be repaired with an acoustic amulet! One day you will serve the Emperor as I serve him. I came a long way to find you!’
AFTER A WHILE, Jomi listened to Serpilian’s thoughts instead and began to understand. This cloaked figure had come a long way to find him. Why, so had the voice; so had the mind, and the daemon, in the robot...
Jomi would be sent far away from the wretched moon, to Earth itself. He thought fleetingly of Gretchi; but as the voice itself had suggested, that kind of yearning seemed to have become extremely insignificant.
GROANING, AND RUBBING his head, Grimm ambled back to where the BONEhead lay sprawled; but it was undeniable that Thunderjug’s whole skull, including the riveted battle honours, was missing. The dwarf patted the toppled giant consolingly on the shoulder. ‘Huh!’ he said.
Bilious-hued power armour loomed. Commander Hachard himself stood over the ogryn.
‘I watched him charge,’ said Hachard’s external speaker. ‘The other subhumans remain alive – I think so, by and large – but not their sergeant. The Grief Bringers are... honoured, by his bravery.’ Ponderously, the Space Marine Commander saluted.
What about me? thought Grimm. I nearly got bloomin’ blown to pieces. But he said nothing. It was Thunderjug who was dead. Bending, assisted by the squat, Hachard dragged the ogryn’s corpse into his powered arms.
As Grimm gazed up at the indigo sky, the stars stared back down at him blindly. The portal had disappeared a while since, yet a tremor seemed to twist the night air, warping the heavens. Or was the distortion due to moisture in his eyes?
HARLEQUIN
CLASSIFICATION: Primary Level Intelligence
CLEARANCE: Slate
ENCRYPTION: Cryptox v.2.1
DATE: 091.M41
AUTHOR: Tech-Adept Auralis Fo, assignum Ordo Xenos
SUBJECT: A bundle discovered
RECIPIENT: Tech-Magos Xandrus Har Lambetter, assignum Ordo Xenos
My lord,
As the Machine God is my witness, I have been engaged upon my habitual duties of repair and maintenance. An hour or so before vespers yesterday, while invoking
the Ritual of Rust Suppression in the eastern chambers bearing the outflow pipes from the Great Cogitatorum, I had cause to anoint the sacred unguent upon a deep section that has not been visited for many a century.
It was there, lodged between two ancient and holy effluent tubes that I discovered a dust-covered bundle. At the first, assuming it was nothing but the commonplace cadaver of one of the dust-rats that typically are to be found in these ancient chambers, forgive me, I struck it with my soldering lance, causing it to catch light and smoulder for a few moments. In that instant I realised that the item was not as I suspected, but a bundle wrapped in oil-cloth. I levered the package loose and extinguished the flames with my feet. Upon further investigation, I was able to unwrap the binding, to reveal a clutch of parchment and manuscript, cracked and creased with great age. The pages vary in material and dimensions, but the hand of author remains constant, leading me to ascertain that they form a journal, or possibly a fiction. May the Machine God forgive me, but I confess my inadvertent application of flames to the package did no more than destroy more than a handful of sheets and obscure a few dozen more with burns and scorching.
Lord, I am certainly no scholar, but these documents seem fearful old. From careful study of the records of the dates of previous rituals in these chambers, I have ascertained that they have probably not been disturbed for over seven centuries. Beyond that, I am unworthy to pass further judgement. That is plainly for our great masters to determine.
And thus I am despatching my discovery in all good haste to you, sir, in the expectation that you will decide whether these scraps are an important, long lost journal of great important to our Inquisitorial masters. If they prove to be mere trash and ephemera, I trust that you will forgive my imposition, and destroy them in any manner which you see fit.
Praise the machine!
Tech-Adept Fo