It was a violent storm, no doubt there. But there existed no passion, no anger, no intent in the warp’s tides.
Elsewhere on De Profundis, the decks were alive with activity, as Astartes and human crew made ready for planetfall.
Xi-Nu 37 was largely immune to the brain chemistry necessary to feel excitement, having reengineered himself beyond such sensation. Instead, he focused entirely on his work, which stimulated the pleasure centres of his brain – a minute amount for each subroutine performed with absolute accuracy and ergonomic efficiency.
His fingers – fifteen of them spread across three mechanical hands – worked in the armoured bowl of Alizarin’s skull. It was a process of restructuring globs of bio-plastic, each one dripping with nutrient-rich juices, within the robot’s head. Each tract of spherical relay globes needed to be fixed and sealed into position, then connected to the slave systems they controlled, as well as the fail-safes they relied on in incidents of battle damage. Such were the workings of the robotic mind: an intelligence in mimicry of life, grown in a gene-lab to be used in a machine body.
The smell rising from this bowl of artificial cerebrospinal fluid was a revoltingly spicy reek reminiscent of rotting onions, but of course, Xi-Nu 73 had taken himself beyond the capacity to react to that as well. He only knew of the smell at all because his perceptive sensors streamed data onto his retinas, describing the stench in bland screeds of binary.
Despite the intricacies of his task, Xi-Nu 73 reserved a median five per cent of his focus to monitor his surroundings. Internal sensor arrays, perceiving the world through echolocation, first tracked the door to his workshop opening, then the movement of a figure traversing the chamber. The figure emitted an unmistakable power signature: armour, Mark III, Astartes.
Several other signals joined the first. Five Astartes in total.
These details flashed up as runic symbols on Xi-Nu 73’s vision display. He paid them little heed, knuckle-deep as he was in organic slime, plugging tiny interface feeds into segmented spheres of bio-plastic. Each sphere was a part of the cortex program. Each fibre-optic link simulated synapses.
The Astartes had the good grace not to interrupt. They waited the three point three-two minutes until Xi-Nu 73 had finished the current phase of ministrations. A satisfaction pulse wormed through Xi-Nu’s datacore. Dampened pleasure receptors fired. Work was complete.
At last, the Mechanicum adept turned from the workshop table. Ooze dripped from his fifteen metal fingers.
‘Subcommander,’ he said, neither acknowledging the senior sergeants at Argel Tal’s side nor offering the kind of respectful bow usually given by mortal members of the crew. ‘You are present to commence preparations on Incarnadine.’
Argel Tal was armoured for the coming planetfall, as were the officers with him. Xaphen, clad in black, Dagotal, Malnor and Torgal – all wearing the Legion’s granite grey.
‘It is time,’ said Argel Tal.
Xi-Nu’s three lens-eyes took a few seconds to refocus. ‘This way,’ the adept replied.
The warriors followed the machine-priest into the red-lit chamber beyond.
It wasn’t that Xi-Nu 73 felt any shame in Incarnadine’s induction into the Word Bearers Legion. Such an honour was tantamount to the highest accolades in the Legio Cybernetica, and evidence of the commanding adept’s mastery – such a machine clearly had a spirit of fierce intensity, and was worthy of recognition.
It was just that since the induction into the Serrated Sun, since the Chapter’s sigil had been etched onto the robot’s forehead, the Conqueror Primus of 9th Maniple was a touch more... erratic. The machine’s spirit had the error-laden propensity to act unpredictably, and that was unacceptable.
Even to a veteran adept like Xi-Nu 73, this made no sense outside of his deepest, darkest suspicions. He’d run several hundred diagnostics, as was his meticulous duty, but the discrepancies (the flaws? The aberrations?) in Incarnadine’s cortex would resurface after each maintenance.
On one occasion, never to be repeated, Xi-Nu 73 had taken the greatest, gravest risk, purging Incarnadine’s bioplastic brain. After flushing every trace of matter from the robot’s skull bowl, he rebuilt the cortex over the space of four months, using spare parts, ritually cleansed after being taken from his supply caches.
The robot had a new brain, for Cog’s sake. And still, still, it was...
Well. There was another problem. The Martian code-tongue lacked adequate description to summate the problem. Xi-Nu 73 had ventured the closest human term to describe the situation was that his Conqueror Primus was glitched. He considered this a symptom of his assignment, not just to the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet, but to the Word Bearers Legion itself.
The war machines and expert technical crews of Carthage Cohort were spread across the many Word Bearers fleets, rather than housed on their own Mechanicum vessels the way the Titan Legions were. Lorgar’s own insistence made it thus. Decades before, when the Legio Cybernetica had first approached the Word Bearer lord, Lorgar had generously offered to modify his vessels to accommodate the specialist needs of his new Mechanicum allies.
‘We are all brothers under the same god’s gaze,’ he’d said to the Fabricator-General, during his first visit to the surface of Mars. Apparently, a concordance was reached soon after. The Carthage Cohort, one of Cybernetica’s proudest armies, would march with the XVII Legion, and dwell in the bowels of their vessels.
Xi-Nu 73 had not been present at the time this ancient oath was sworn – had not even been flesh-born back then – and this contributed to his doubts about the tale’s veracity. The reason it never cogitated as pure truth to Xi-Nu’s perceptions was simple: despite how useful the Carthage Cohort was to the Word Bearers Legion, the Astartes simply did not like the Mechanicum element in their midst. Relations were closer to cold than cordial, even taking the Mechanicum’s inhumanity into consideration.
It was said other Legions worked more harmoniously with the Martian Cybernetica cult, especially the blessed Iron Hands and unbreakable Iron Warriors – both of whom enjoyed the Mechanicum’s immense (and immensely valuable) respect from the first days their forces joined together in the Terran Emperor’s crusade.
But over time, Xi-Nu 73 – who had most humbly risen to oversee a maniple of four robots – came to realise that the Word Bearers were not like their Astartes brothers. It was an opinion shared by others of his rank, on those increasingly rare occasions he established contact with them.
As the fleets moved farther and farther apart since the last grand gathering at Colchis three years before, so too did contact between the Carthage maniples wane. Vox-signals would never reach across such distances. Even astropathy was rumoured to be becoming unreliable – not that Xi-Nu 73 had access to such a talent.
Xi-Nu 73’s principal problem where the Word Bearers were concerned was their fundamental organic nature. In short, they were too human. They valued the flawed aspects of faith, focusing on the flesh and the soul, rather than transcendence through oneness with the Machine-God. They were fuelled by emotion, rather than logic, which affected their tactical decisions and their very goals in the Great Crusade.
Most tellingly of all, many of the Serrated Sun’s warriors seemed uncomfortable around the Mechanicum adepts themselves, as if forever on the edge of voicing some accusation, or framing a grievous complaint.
Too human. That was the problem. Too emotional, too driven by instinctive faith and eloquent diction. Too human, resulting in distance between the factions.
The exception to this distance was a source of disquiet for Xi-Nu 73, because the exception was his own Conqueror Primus.
Incarnadine, blessings upon its brave soul, was sincerely respected by the Word Bearers.
Indeed, they called it ‘Brother’.
He led the Astartes into the preparatory chamber, where his wards were undergoing the final rituals before reawakening. The three armoured machines stood in impassive silence, doted on by Mechanicum menials, all under Xi
-Nu 73’s command. Two of the robed attendants were lifting Vermillion’s back-mounted lascannon, hefting it up along its greased runner track, testing the smoothness of motion as they brought it up to the firing position on the Cataphract’s shoulder.
Sanguine, the gangly Crusader-class twin to Alizarin, was almost ready. The juddering clank of autoloaders filled the chamber as its shoulder cannon was fed fresh stores of ammunition. Servitors oiled its joints, only allowed near the war machine now that the vital work was complete.
Incarnadine was waiting for them.
That fact brought a stab of irritatingly human unease to Xi-Nu 73’s thought processes. The robot’s combat wetware was about to be installed, and then Incarnadine would be ready for deployment. But there it was: the anomalous reading in its brain patterns. An attention spike in the otherwise flat-lining rumble of its cognition. This flare of perception, along with the faintest adjustment of its visual receptors, only ever occurred in the presence of Word Bearers.
Like an animal instinctively recognising its kin, Incarnadine knew when warriors of the XVII Legion were near.
This was why Xi-Nu 73’s pride was tainted. The robot’s cortex shouldn’t have allowed for this level of recognition without its combat wetware installed. It shouldn’t be able to distinguish between targets and non-targets – seeing no difference between Astartes, human soldiers, aliens, or anything else.
In fact, it shouldn’t be able to perceive anything at all beyond the presence of walls and floors, with the simple operational understanding not to crash into anything. And yet the robot had been waiting for this moment. Xi-Nu 73 tracked the glitch in Incarnadine’s sensors as the Conqueror Primus recognised the Word Bearers before it.
‘Incarnadine,’ said Argel Tal, and the voice broke the adept’s scrambled line of reasoning. The subcommander wore no helm, and Xi-Nu 73 saw the Astartes looking up at the towering machine. With no small reverence, the warrior unrolled a scroll of parchment, and began to read.
‘As a warrior of the Seventeenth Legio Astartes, the Bearers of the Word, a brotherhood born of Colchis and born of Terra, do you swear to fight in the name of Lorgar – heart and soul, body and blood – until the world below, designated One-Three-Zero One-Nine, is brought to lawful compliance with the Imperium of Man?’
Incarnadine stood in silence. Argel Tal smiled, and didn’t look away.
‘Incarnadine,’ said Xi-Nu 73 from his position to the side, ‘swears the oath as it is written.’
The Astartes continued as if the adept wasn’t even there. ‘Incarnadine, your oath of moment is witnessed by your brothers...’
‘Dagotal.’
‘Torgal.’
‘Malnor.’
‘Xaphen.’
‘...and affirmed by myself, Argel Tal, Subcommander of the Serrated Sun.’ The captain affixed the scroll to Incarnadine’s armour plating, mounting it on the hooks designed especially for this use. All five of the Astartes wore similar scrolls attached to their shoulder guards.
Xi-Nu 73’s pride warred with his unfading irritation. Praise to the Omnissiah for the blessing of his own Conqueror Primus being accepted into an Astartes Legion’s ranks, but curse the influence such a loyalty was having on its cortex.
The ritual completed, the Astartes saluted with their fists over their primary hearts, and made their way from the chamber. There’d been a time when the warriors would have made the sign of the aquila, but Xi-Nu 73 hadn’t seen them perform the Imperial salute since the Legion’s shaming three years before.
In the red-lit gloom of the chamber, the adept focused his tri-lens gaze on the hulking form of his favoured ward.
‘Where do your loyalties lie, I wonder?’
Incarnadine didn’t answer. It stood as it had for hours now: silently awaiting the next battle.
The ship shook again – even in orbit, the void around this new world was rich with warp energies, and occasional pulses of force brushed the ship’s skin. Xi-Nu 73 had also stripped his brain function to deplete the fantastical outreaching of his human imagination, and yet the squealing of the storm against the hull sounded like... claws.
He filed the sound in his lobe archives, and went about his duties, only occasionally disturbed by the sound of nails clawing at the metal hull.
The Blessed Lady really needed to put some clothes on.
She reached blindly over the edge of her bed, her hand patting the floor, questing until she found her robe. Cyrene was slipping the garment over her head when she felt Arric’s arms encircling her from behind.
‘It’s still early,’ he said, breathing the words against her neck.
‘Actually, I think you’re already late. That wasn’t the dawn chime, it was the signal for noon.’
‘Don’t joke,’ he said, pulling her closer.
‘I’m not joking.’ Cyrene ran her fingers through her hair, ignoring his as they quested over her. ‘Arric,’ she said, ‘I’m really not joking.’
He rolled out of bed with an ‘Oh, shit...’ before repeating the curse a number of times, in various languages.
Being in love with an officer could, at times, be an educational experience – especially ones that could swear in eighteen Gothic dialects.
‘Shit,’ he finished the tirade back where he started. ‘I have to go. Where the hell is my sabre?’
She faced him without seeing him. ‘I think it slid under the bed. I heard it scrape on the floor last night.’
‘Where would I be without you?’ Arric dragged the blade out from beneath the bed, and fastened the leather belt around his crumpled, unbuttoned uniform. ‘I’ll be back later,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Planetfall today,’ he said, as if it would somehow be news to her. The ship quivered around them, and she reached out to the wall, steadying herself.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Though with this storm...’
‘I know,’ she said again.
‘How do I look?’ he spoke the words with a grin, always enjoying this oldest of rituals between them. Usually she smiled back. Not this time.
‘Like someone who is late for a meeting with fleet command. Now go.’
Argel Tal nodded to Major Jesmetine as the human officer half-tumbled through the closing doors.
‘I’m here,’ he called out. ‘I made it.’
His ochre uniform, marking him as a senior commander in the 54th Euchar Infantry, wouldn’t pass muster on a parade ground without some serious tidying up first. His black hair was in a similar state, and he’d not shaved this morning, either.
He regarded the others gathered in the briefing room, where they all stood around an expansive central table. Forty men, women and Astartes (the latter, he smirkingly liked to call ‘post-humans’) turned to regard him in turn.
Above them, the chamber’s illumination globes flickered as the ship shuddered again.
‘Sorry,’ said the major. ‘I’m here now.’
Several heads shook, while irritated mutters broke out. The officer took one of the few places left at the table, next to a Word Bearer captain. The charged hum from the warrior’s armour joints was ear-achingly loud up close. It made it a chore to hear the others’ voices.
‘Good of you to join us, Arric,’ Fleet Commander Baloc Torvus said, scowling down the table at the breathless major. ‘As I was saying–’
‘My apologies,’ the major interrupted again. ‘The servitors on D deck are struggling with the... elevator... gyro-cogs. Something of a nightmare, really. Had to run the long way.’
From across the chamber, the armoured figure of Chapter Master Deumos thudded a fist onto the table.
‘Be quiet, you fool,’ he grunted.
‘Sorry, sir.’ Arric saluted – the pre-Crusade fist over his chest, rather than the aquila.
Xi-Nu 73 turned his hooded head with a rattle of grinding gears. ‘There is no component in the ship’s construction matching the term “gyro-cog”,’ he noted.
Arric narrow
ed his eyes at the tech-adept. Thanks for that.
‘I am aware,’ the Word Bearer lord growled, ‘that Major Jesmetine was lying through his teeth with very little skill. Torvus, get on with the details. We have a world to bring to compliance.’
Torvus began his summary, detailing land masses, population projections, and the disposition of forces. The people of 1301-12 were primitives, yet the entire Expeditionary Fleet was preparing for war: Army contingent, Astartes companies, Mechanicum forces – everything.
It all depended on first contact.
Arric listened to the things he’d already studied in the official reports. He caught the Word Bearer captain next to him glancing down.
‘Did you comb your hair with your fingers?’ Argel Tal asked.
The doors slid open before Arric could reply, but the retort would have been a rude one. Clad in ceremonial armour of chainmail and a breastplate of carved ivory, the primarch entered the war room.
‘My friends, please accept the sincerest apologies for my untimely arrival.’ Lorgar favoured them all with a beatific smile before taking his place at the head of the table. ‘I trust all is in readiness for planetfall?’
The gathered commanders assured him that it was. Resplendent in the ceremonial armour of a Covenant warlord, Lorgar listened to their reports in turn.
‘Sire,’ one said, at the conclusion.
‘Speak, Argel Tal.’
‘One matter still troubles me. It has been three weeks now,’ the captain said, ignoring the mutters that started up. ‘Where is the Unending Reverence?’
Lorgar rested his golden hands on the central table, leaning forward. All present could see in his eyes how much the words cost him.
‘It is stormlost. We will mourn the crew, and our brothers on board. But it is folly to hold out hope any longer.’
‘Sire...’ Argel Tal was far from placated. ‘We will not even search for them? One vessel stormlost is a tragedy, but three... Aurelian, please, the Expedition is threatened. We must seek them.’
The First Heretic Page 18