Torquora transmitted back.
Stroika told him.
Magos Torquora told him, visiting upon the skitarius an orbital pict of a great explorator drop-ship, sat on the ice beside the buried wreck of the Stella-Xenithica.
Magos Torquora told the skitarius.
Stroika sent back.
Omnid Torquora told him. Stroika could detect, even in the ancient magos’s steely transmissions, the hint of excitement.
0010
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE CORPUS MECHANICUS+
The arkcruiser Maestrale made its descent. Below the explorator vessel the forge world of Satzica Secundus turned. Bathed in the heat and red light of its local star, the planet’s thick, black cloud cover was tinged with an infernal hue. The arkcruiser’s approach meant dropping down through the planet’s swarm of tiny fabricator moons. Upon doing so it drifted downwards through the orbital plates, defence platforms and shipyards that circled the forge world. The ponderous progress of their mesmerising paths was a thing of intersecting beauty. These obstacles the Maestrale negotiated with clockwork precision. There would be many scopes, optics and eyes trained on the vessel and Magos Torquora would not risk the disaster of a collision.
The low gravitational conditions on Satzica Secundus meant that the factoria, smoke stacks and strato-forges reached high up into the sky. They pierced the planet’s oppressive cloud cover, the result of thousands of years of relentless industry. The chemical brume of heavy metal vapours was a pincushion through which the tallest soot-stained towers, forge temples and ventscrapers rose.
Haldron-44 Stroika stood on the edge of the flight deck, looking down upon his forge world home as it rose up to meet him. The servo-skull Phrenos~361 hovered idly nearby, waiting to be of some service to its master. About them the superstructure of the bay creaked as the arkcruiser once more knew the gravitational pull of low anchorage. Stroika’s optics glazed with idle trajectories and data unsought. As it was, the Maestrale was keeping rotational pace with a colossal structure below – a mighty forge whose temple towers rose so high out of the black cloud that they almost appeared to reach out for the arkcruiser.
Stroika didn’t need datastreams to tell him that he looked upon the forge temple principal, the seat of the Fabricator General and High Gnostarch of Satzica Secundus. It was known across the forge world as the Thunderfane, for taking the cacophony of its sacred industry highest into the heavens.
As Stroika watched, he saw a baroque craft of ornate design ascend from the Thunderfane’s apex platforms, a vessel all brass, gold and Martian red. Extending the telescoptics of his helm, the Primus scanned the vessel for identification. To his surprise, the Fabricator General’s own orbital barge was approaching the Maestrale, flanked by a pair of ornamental landers.
The stream carried the signifiers of 10-Victro Tiberiax, Stroika’s legionary second among the Deuteron-IV Praetori. While alphas, commanders and princeps like Talus-Spuria I/X led individual units, Stroika and Tiberiax held responsibility for every skitarii soldier on board the Maestrale, and both the martial and cult traditions that governed their number.
The landing bay was suddenly awash with activity. A gaggle of tech-priests arrived on the deck, the skirts of their rust-red robes trailing after them. Some were spindly magi sporting scaffolds of slender clawed appendages, while others were nests of snaking mechadendrites. Several of the diagnostiquorum were broad, barrel-chested constructs whose augmentations had added a baroque bulk to otherwise feeble frames.
The tech-priests were shadowed by Mechanicus protectors, personal bodyguards of frightful augmentation. The magi and their personal ward engines in turn were flanked by 10-Victro Tiberiax and soldiers of the Lex-70 Ranger-Expatriarii. All knew their place in the stratified ranks of the Mechanicus. The heavy hydraulics of the skitarii’s legs beat a rhythm on the deck that could be heard and felt.
Stroika had assigned the rangers as a planetary escort, ensuring that the visored helm and plate of each soldier gleamed. Their robust hydraulics had been soaked in baptismal oils and received special attention for the slightest lag or fault. With ceremonial battle cloaks and polished galvanic rifles, Stroika was certain that the Lex-70 Ranger-Expatriarii would do both himself and his magos proud.
At the heart of the delegation was Magos Omnid Torquora. The explorator had spent an extended lifetime in the field. He had favoured the perils and rewards of exploration and reconquest over a forge world existence, with its feudal politics and currying favour at the Thunderfane.
His choices had cost him, however, especially during his early survey missions as a young explorator in the Dragortha Deeps. His body was now but a flesh-plugged husk. The depths of his red hood hid the ghoulish features of a cadaverous face and the darkness within it framed the blue burn of optics that seared with priestly obsession.
Torquora’s torso was spoiling flesh shot through with cables, while the ragged stumps of his limbs had been surgically interfaced with a hulking suit of crafted armour. The clinker-plate frame lent the ancient tech-priest the bulk of a battle-automaton, the magna-pneumatics of each shoulder supporting stowed heavy weaponry. The chunky hydraulics of armoured legs carried the weight of the explorator’s augmentations, clunking with each heavy step.
A slender pair of auxiliary appendages reached out through the tech-priest’s chassis-concealing robes. Their multi-digits were feverishly at work across the runebanks of cogitators and logic engines housed within the armoured pulpit that formed the suit’s projecting chest.
Omnid Torquora led his diagnostiquorum of tech-priests, logistae and artisan advisors. The disciples of the Machine-God. Behind them an itinerant ark trundled on thick tracks. The prize within was hidden behind adamantium plate, a kaleidoscopic bubble of overlapping protective shielding, stasis fields and a chrono-containment lock. A technological treasure the explorator had recovered from the Stella-Xenithica and was now to ceremonially present to his Fabricator General.
Tiberiax communicated.
10-Victro Tiberiax marched ahead of his skitarii and the diagnostiquorum’s protector ward engines. Like his rangers and Stroika, Tiberiax gleamed for the occasion. The silver of his plate and the rich red of his battle cloak honoured the event. The only individual who seemed to have gone to no extra preparation was Torquora himself, whose brazen bionics went unpolished and whose robes were dark with the stain of maintenance and grease. Even the explorator’s spoiling stench had gone unmasked. Stroika’s processors told him that there was a 16.349 per cent chance that the magos had simply been too busy with his preparations. Based on how the officer knew Torquora felt about forge world politics, the skitarius estimated a 43.998 per cent likelihood that it was intended as some kind of slight or insult.
Stroika sent back to Tiberiax.
Tiberia
x sent the noospheric blurt of a salute to his commander, which Stroika returned as he joined the party. Cranial locks turned on the side of Stroika’s cog-plumed helmet, allowing the Primus to disengage it from his cranial interfacing. His shaven head was covered in haptic sockets, flesh plugs and a web of embedded cabling. He held the helmet out and allowed the servo-skull Phrenos~361 to carry it in its trailing mechadendrites.
Stroika’s skin was swarthy like that of his Satzican brothers. His eyes were his own, but ringed with screw-interfacia optics that gave him the appearance of wearing lensless goggles. His mouth was relaxed and his face at the kind of peace and obedience of mind that surgeo-suppression procedures ensured.
Stroika looked to Magos Torquora and opted for the modulated informality of speech.
‘The Fabricator General sends his personal barge for you, my lord.’
‘For me?’ the explorator said, his own modulations shot through with truculence and sickly static. ‘For you? No, Stroika-unit. For the treasure we bring him. He honours the Machine-God’s wonder with his barge, not our own.’
‘Are we not all the Machine-God’s wonders, magos?’ Stroika ventured.
‘Yes, but we are not all equal in His eyes,’ Torquora replied, the party of tech-priests and its ceremonial escort making its way across the deck. The Fabricator General’s barge rose to meet them, the ornate transport settling in a flight bay. The hydraulics of its landing claws hissed and the craft was briefly lost in a cloud of steam. ‘One cog may turn another through a set of gears and yet by the nature of the mechanism the two cogs never meet. We are those cogs, dutifully turning, lending power to the betters turning above us.’
‘But we are about to meet the Fabricator General…’ Stroika said.
‘By the grace of your function, you have been allowed your curiosity,’ Torquora warned the Primus. ‘Do not use such a hallowed gift for insolent suggestion.’
‘My lord, I…’
the magos explorator told him, his voice echoing through the skitarius’s thoughts.
‘They do, magos,’ Stroika assured him.
Torquora streamed. The Primus did not know whether this was a compliment or not. Once again, Stroika heard the magos’s voice proceed from his jaundiced lips.
‘These events are unusual in their historical significance. Protocol is being subverted. You are to me as I am to the Fabricator General. As billions are to him. He is nothing, however, to the Great Maker – who is the glory of the Machine absolute, the Corpus Mechanicus. The Omnissiah can make us and He can break us. In this instance, something wonderful has happened. A gift long lost has been given back to our empire. This audience with the Fabricator General is not an honour – it is a formality. I tell you this: the Omnissiah has bestowed this gift on us all. I shall be flesh-damned before I let it end up in the depths of some vault or as part of a political pay-off. It shall function as it was intended and through that function honour us all. I would not meet with this nest of silicon vipers, were they not to be the key to such a realisation.’
‘Then you hold no regard for the Fabricator General and the priesthood of Satzica Secundus?’ Stroika asked.
‘I hold them in every regard,’ Omnid Torquora told him. ‘I simply wish to be that cog far removed. I do not desire to be coated in the grease of their oily dealings, their affairs of heart and greed. Why do you think I sought the path of the explorator? It was the ships of such undertakings and the tech-priests that commanded them that could take me farthest from this place. We must, however, pay the price of our successes.’
As the delegation of tech-priests, protectors and skitarii rangers approached the orbital barge, its ramp descended. Lowering with it was Master-Manciple Proxis, the Fabricator General’s personal emissary. Proxis kept the claw-toolage of his appendages buried in his accommodating sleeves. The master-manciple’s ribbed gown and hood concealed the wonder of his workings, but his face was plain to see. Within the glass bowl of his head sloshed an excited mixture of liquid metal that masked his features. The metal had the ability to replicate the faces of those whom he addressed. Combined with a dialogus-matrix, this made Proxis an excellent emissary for his master, since it was difficult to feel hostility towards one’s own face.
Proxis issued forth a stream of code, reverential blurts and binaric cant. He followed this introduction with one issued from his vox-hailers.
‘Magos Torquora,’ Proxis said, his features assuming the semblance of the explorator’s rancid own, ‘his excellency Voricar Trega, Fabricator General and High Gnostarch of Satzica Secundus, bids you a welcome return.’
‘I am honoured,’ said Omnid Torquora, turning his hood slightly to reinforce to Stroika that he was anything but. Within moments the master-manciple’s face had changed again. It assumed the form of his Fabricator General – the flattery of a younger incarnation, of course – before returning to a silvery representation of Torquora’s own.
‘It has been too long, magos,’ Proxis said.
‘And yet not long enough…’ Torquora returned, allowing a ripple of doubt to pass through the liquid metal in the bowl, ‘…to fully complete my mission. I had to leave a macroclade of skitarii to secure the remaining secrets of the site. I fear that we leave further secrets undiscovered, to be pillaged by the enemies of Mars.’
‘The Fabricator General regrets that,’ Proxis told him, ‘but wishes me to assure you that reinforcements are en route to the Perborea system to further secure the Stella-Xenithica site.’
Torquora turned to allow Haldron-44 Stroika to see the displeasure on his ruined face, the light from the deck lumens invading the depths of the tech-priest’s hood. Stroika had left a skitarii garrison under the command of Talus-Spuria I/X, who had received a well-earned promotion for his part in securing the colony ship.
His orders had been to provide security for the wreck and the small army of catalogistae and magi archeotechnis Omnid Torquora had left on the miserable ice world to continue the Omnissiah’s good work. Stroika had thought it unlikely that the secrets of the colony ship would be discovered by others, based upon the length of time that had passed between previous visitations. The Primus could not believe that the Stella-Xenithica or even the greenskin savages had purposely visited the ice ball of a planet, which held little strategic or resource value. What Stroika hadn’t factored into his assessment was the danger posed by other magi and explorators, eager to get to Perborea and steal the vessel’s valuable secrets and treasures for themselves.
‘Is that–’ Proxis began, craning the bowl of his head around to see the itinerant ark behind.
‘Yes,’ Torquora cut him off. ‘It is.’
‘When the Fabricator General learned of your find, from the encrypted astrotelepathic field reports, he insisted upon seeing such a treasure for himself. He was eager that it benefit immediately from the sanctity and full security of the forge world. That is not a problem, is it, magos?’
‘No problem,’ the explorator said, through gritted adamantalloy teeth.
‘You understand, of course, magos…’
‘Oh yes,’ Torquora told him. ‘I understand completely.’
‘Shall we, then?’ Proxis said. ‘The entire forge world awaits you and your treasure.’
‘Let’s.’
SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE+
The orbital barge roared across the surface of the clouds, churning up a billowing chromatic haze from the toxic darkness below. As Haldron-44 Stroika stood in the baroque luxury of the bay-vestibule, he watched his home world blur by. The barge passed between zeppelins tethered to processing towers and down through the torrents of high-altitude traffic
: haulage brigs, bulk transports and freighters.
Cherubim and silver-skinned servitors moved about the barge passengers, all decked out in the feudal livery of the Thunderfane, offering consecrated oils, power and amasec for those tech-priests who were partial.
A pair of ancient security-automata flanked the closed bay ramp, their still and imposing forms like statues. Master-Manciple Proxis was exchanging words of congratulation with the tech-priests of Torquora’s diagnostiquorum, as his role dictated. Several electro-priests came forth chanting cult litanies and giving thanks, the flesh of their faces a network of sub-dermal circuitry. Making the sign of the Holy Cog and slashing the crackling bolts of blessing across chests with the termini of their fingertips, the tech-priests moved on to more formal rituals about the shape of the tracked ark.
Like the magos explorator, the skitarii rangers and protector bodyguards wanted little to do with the ceremony and fuss unfolding in the vestibule-bay. With the servo-skull Phrenos~361 still holding his helmet beside him, Haldron-44 Stroika returned his gaze to the broad viewport on the barge’s elevated belvedere.
The barge was surging across the thick ocean of black cloud, taking a tour of the region’s grandest and most significant strato-forges. Upon their clean domes, pyramids and temple tops that reached clear of the smog, thousands of tech-priests, magi and forge world significants gathered to watch the passage of the barge from balconies and platforms. They were there to honour the return of the Maestrale and its precious cargo, but despite gathering for the purpose of celebration, there were no shouts of jubilation or waving from the crowd. They simply stared blankly at the passing of the barge and the treasure it contained. They made the sign of the Holy Cog and streamed their coded praise.
Stroika knew that it would be the same in the darkness below the cloud cover. In earlier service to the Omnissiah, he had toiled in the groundmills and scraper-factoria. He had done so as both a fresh-fleshed menial and a citizen construct, proudly putting the first of many augmentations to work in the name of the Machine-God Incarnate.
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