The World Engine

by Ben Counter

  Help.

  The entrance was dark. It was just wide and tall enough for a Space Marine to walk through upright. Hyalhi waved Brother Masadh forwards and he took the lead.

  The pathway was narrow. It wound through maintenance ducts and support struts holding up the mass of Borsis above. Ghazin struggled second to last in the marching order, Apothecary Saahr holding him up when his legs threatened to collapse. The smell down here was old dust and dried-out machine oil, a welcome change from the fresh blood and decaying meat of the processing chamber.

  ‘Stay your hands, brothers,’ voxed Hyalhi from ahead. ‘This is the message Borsis wants us to hear. Let us listen before we default to destroying it.’

  The Astral Knights spread out into a wider space ahead. There was no light here save for the faint glow from the Space Marines’ eyepieces. Ghazin’s enhanced vision rendered it a monochrome world of ghosts.

  The chamber was an incidental void between two foundations or support columns, never meant for any particular use. The walls and floor were steel beams. The ceiling was a mass of pipes and cables. Lubricant dripped from metal stalactites and pooled in stained oily puddles.

  Another machine stood in the chamber. It was not constructed with the alien efficiency of everything else the Astral Knights had encountered on Borsis. It was built principally of human brains – fresh, wet brains arranged like bunches of fat pink berries around a construction of pistons and valves. The scarabs gathered around the foot of the machine, swarming over it, tending to the brains and the strands of tissue that connected them to the machine.

  ‘This world has nothing but horrors for us,’ snarled Felhidar.

  ‘A horror perhaps,’ said Hyalhi. ‘But Borsis kept it well hidden.’

  ‘From the slaves?’ asked Brother Masadh.

  ‘Or from the necrons,’ said Hyalhi. ‘This place is far from the eyes of whatever beings rule Borsis. I would wager the creatures here were not part of their armies. They were scavengers, picking over the detritus of the necron civilisation. This is the right place to hide a secret, so far from view.’

  The scarabs withdrew a long steel probe from the entrails of the machine – Ghazin saw they might be literal entrails, going by the dark red slithering mass that churned inside its casing. The valves clacked as the scarabs held the probe out – it was a thin silver spike, connected by tangles of slick wire to the brains and valve arrays.

  ‘It wants to communicate,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Our duty is to listen. Watch my back, brothers. The necrons may have more warriors down here.’ Hyalhi reconfigured his psychic hood, hinging back the segment that arched over his head. His hair was shorn close and he had several ports in the back of his cranium, linked to the psychic circuits of the hood by short cables – these he unhooked, leaving his mind temporarily unshielded.

  Hyalhi knelt before the machine. The scarabs extended the probe.

  ‘Lord Hyalhi,’ said Felhidar. ‘We have no idea what these machines wish of us. This could be a trap for all we know. Let one of us…’

  ‘I expect more of you, brother!’ snapped Hyalhi. ‘A leader among the Astral Knights must be ready to risk the lives of his battle-brothers, but never their minds. This is not a sacrifice I can demand of anyone else. It must be me or no one else. You know this full well, and your false valour serves no purpose.’

  Hyalhi leaned towards the machine and the probe extended. The tip of it touched his temple.

  ‘Wait,’ said Ghazin. He struggled forward through his squadmates to Hyalhi’s side. ‘Hyalhi, you speak of sacrifice. But we need not make one at all.’

  ‘Enough of this,’ said Hyalhi. ‘We must…’

  ‘Hear me out,’ retorted Ghazin. ‘I cannot fight until I reach a proper apothecarion facility, which we will not find on this planet. And we all know there is every chance none of us will ever leave Borsis. That means I am as good as dead to this Chapter. I cannot fight and in all likelihood never will again. So sacrificing my mind and my life is no sacrifice at all. But your mind is one of the greatest weapons this Chapter has. You have no right to put it at risk.’

  Hyalhi stepped back just as the probe broke his skin. A drop of blood ran down his temple.

  ‘I never considered you so insubordinate, Brother Ghazin,’ he said.

  ‘But I am right,’ said Ghazin.

  Hyalhi stood aside. Ghazin removed his helmet and half-fell to his knees in front of the machine. He shivered in the sudden chill of the air against his sweating face.

  The scarabs slid the probe towards him and he bowed his head to meet it. It was a wonderful relief that he felt then. He had a purpose still, even if he could not heft a bolter or wield a chainsword. He would not be denied his chance to sacrifice everything he had on the altar of victory.

  Was it selfish to desire the chance to make that sacrifice? Was it a dereliction of his duty to pursue it too eagerly? He banished the idea. This was not the time for doubt.

  His train of thought was broken by the hot scream of the silver probe being thrust through his right eye.

  Ghazin needed something to hold on to. The first thing that came into his mind was the image of a shield split asunder, as if by the blow from a battleaxe or a greatsword. He had seen it in many forms, from the actual article mounted on a wall to the stylised shape worn as a brooch or a belt buckle. Now he saw it as a painted crest, surrounded by the names of a dozen ancestors, topped with a crown of ancient Obsidia.

  House Suulkeyar had been kings once. They never saw their present state as a fall from that time. It was instead an evolution, a continuous existence through all the upheavals of their planet’s history that no other bloodline had survived intact. They were proud that their ancestors had once worn the crown, and the emblem of the sundered shield represented all the battles they had weathered to keep it.

  Ghazin was a son of House Suulkeyar. His people had explored the shores of the Sea of Sorrow and fought the wretches of House Janiak. He was one of a long line of sons who had marched as Astral Knights, a past Chapter Master among them. He kept the sundered shield in his thoughts as the probe’s icy agony ran right through his mind.

  He could see through his remaining eye as the Astral Knights rushed to his side to keep him from toppling over onto the floor. He could see the brains hooked up to the machine pulsing and the valves hissing vapour as the machine worked frantically. But over that was ghosted another image, one of churning nothingness, a mess of colour and form like madness given shape.

  He heard a sound like a choir of a thousand voices howling out of tune. Hot and cold ran up and down him as if fingers of ice and fire were raking at his skin under his armour. He smelled blood and burning steel. The room felt like it was tilting around him, though the augmentations to his inner ear meant a Space Marine could never lose his balance. Every sense was wrenched aside by the information coursing into him from the machine.

  Brother Felhidar knelt and removed his helmet, and was shouting at Ghazin. Ghazin could see his lips moving but the words were lost. The mass of colour in his vision resolved into a vague shape – three glowing orbs over a deep circular opening, eyes above a mouth.

  Something writhed inside Ghazin’s head. He could feel it slithering around the inside of his skull. Cold, quivering tendrils wormed into his brain. He could feel each one as it penetrated deeper. Panic, exultation, sorrow and anger washed over him as the upper brain functions were fired off at random.

  The face resolved further and receded. Ghazin saw now an alien form on a throne, in a mighty palace with walls of fire. He was hit by such roaring noise and punishing heat that he felt sure he was inside a star, looking at the being that ruled at the heart of it.

  Its skin was of multi-coloured flame. It had several pairs of arms, each one carrying an implement of rule – a sceptre, an orb, a sword, the jawbone of a vast spacefaring beast. Its three-eyed face was topped with a headdress
of gold and deep blue. Ghazin had an impression of immense size and, above all, awesome and terrible power.

  Thousands of creatures bowed to the throne. Their hunched shapes were covered in dark blistered skin, scorched by the malice of the fire. Some wore similar headdresses and carried regal implements in imitation of the enthroned being. Ghazin recognised the xenos whose statues adorned some of the structures of Borsis – not the necron tech-constructs, but their fleshly counterparts the Astral Knights had only encountered as memorials.

  Ghazin was aware of Apothecary Saahr bending over him and administering a shot of drugs into Ghazin’s neck. But most of his perception was taken up by the scene inside the heart of the star.

  The being on the throne reached out a hand.

  It did not use words. It could not articulate them through this medium. Instead the concepts it was trying to communicate were forced into all Ghazin’s senses.

  It was afraid and in pain. Ghazin felt a taste of acid, like bile, and a thin howling met a sense of being crushed beneath a cold, clammy weight.

  It was angry. A thousand tiny lightning bolts crackled across the inside of Ghazin’s skull. He tasted foulness and rot.

  But a sense of triumph rose up and overwhelmed him. The sound was like trumpets. A wind heavy with bolter smoke buffeted his mind. It was powerful but distant, and Ghazin realised the distance was time. It was a promise.

  There was too much raw power in this information to make out details. Perhaps Ghazin’s mind was too small, or the communicating being had no experience in tailoring its message to a human brain. But Ghazin understood the broadest and most important strokes.

  He forced himself to focus away from the scene of terror and splendour, and focus on what was around his physical form. His battle-brothers were holding him up. One was pinning his arms to his sides, for he was convulsing. With an enormous effort he brought them further into focus and the fires now burned behind the faces of Felhidar and Saahr as they yelled words at him that he could not hear.

  ‘It is trapped here!’ cried out Ghazin. He could not make out his own words but the rawness of his throat told him he was yelling them. ‘It rages at the lords of Borsis! It is full of hatred and power! It promises victory. We have… we have an ally on this world…’

  Ghazin felt a line of red pain as the probe slipped out of his eyeball. He felt the hot spray of blood down his cheek. The image of the star’s heart receded, reduced to a frame of fire burned into his mind’s eye.

  The last scrap of information that had got through to him was more coherent, more specific. A collection of sounds and inflections. A name. It was the core of the message sent to him. It had to be important. Borsis had risked much to force it into Ghazin’s brain.

  ‘Yggra’nya…’ gasped Ghazin.

  Ghazin’s mind imploded under the weight of the information pressed into it. He slumped to the floor and his one good eye rolled back in his skull. The world turned scarlet, then black, and then it was gone.

  Medicae Obscurum Kalliam Helvetar

  Addendum personal

  Inquisitorial Eyes Only

  I am forced to ask the question: how many times can I die before I die for real?

  When I was young, I dwelled often on death. A girl raised in a hive city could hardly watch a day go by without thinking about it. People died. I saw them die – we were middle hivers, but still the violence reached us. I saw a man shot down on the rushway by gunmen in a passing hoverplane. My mother told me perhaps he had made them angry or owed them money. She told me not to stare, and to hurry on.

  I saw my uncle die. He had contracted gutworm from the contaminated waters by the docks. He looked more like a skeleton than a living man. He held me close in the last days and told me how lucky I was. There were twenty-five million people in the hive with less than me, and only five or six million with more. I would live a good Emperor-fearing life. I should rejoice with every day. Then he died, and I did not understand how I could rejoice when nothing I did in Telenact Hive could possibly mean anything to the Emperor. When I died nobody would notice, just like nobody noticed when my uncle died, or the man on the rushway.

  It was always about death. My studies under the medicae were about death. I thought they would enable me to help people, but in truth the duties of a medicae were simply containing the worst diseases and disposing of the unfortunate. We were running to stand still. No one cared what we did. The Emperor certainly didn’t. I passed hangars full of corpse-slabs with bodies to be processed and burned. Death was everywhere – I steeped myself in more of it, not less.

  I wish I could say it was determination that brought me to the Holy Ordos of the Inquisition but it was mostly chance. Perhaps my uncle was right about how lucky a girl his Kalliam was. An interrogator in service to Lord Inquisitor Rhaye – no one knew that then, of course – was seeking heretics who had come to hide in Telenact Hive. I showed him the corpse hangars so he could search them for signs of warpcraft inflicted on the bodies. I performed the task because I was reliable and dour, and the medicae decided I would give the bearer of the Inquisitorial rosette the right impression about how they went about their business. I spent four days there, examining corpses. Death, again, filled my world.

  I was taken off-world to perform the same task elsewhere. I went to a dozen worlds, but all I saw of them was the places they kept their dead. I stank of dead flesh and chemical preservatives, and I could never wash it off. I was immersed in death. It seeped from my pores.

  I wonder now if Lord Rhaye saw that. Maybe it was a coincidence he had me trained in performing autoseances. He has thousands of agents and staff, and many of them have backgrounds like mine, but of all of them he chose me to delve into the minds of the newly dead and sift through whatever is left there. Perhaps the task can only be performed by someone for whom death is more real than her own life. I have not asked him. The commands of a Lord Inquisitor are not to be questioned.

  But I have never myself died, not until the commencement of this autoseance. I had often wondered what death would be like, when it came. Would it hurt? Would I continue to see and hear as they bagged me up and carried me to the slab, until they cut me open or slid me into the incinerator? Would the Emperor really be there waiting for me, or would I cease to exist and somehow experience what it is like to not experience anything? But it turns out I had always been wrong.

  Death is the realisation of what we really are. In death I see a million stars, in a single galaxy with millions of counterparts across an infinite universe. A galaxy could wink out of existence and it would mean nothing against that enormity. But I am just one piece of flesh and bone and blood, on one space station orbiting one chunk of rock, which in turn orbits one of the stars that makes up a single galaxy. I mean nothing. Nothing I will ever do can ever mean anything. To die is to be confronted with that truth.

  I died when Captain Sheherz died. Perhaps a Space Marine sees it differently – they are full of pride and certainty. Maybe even in the moment of death he still believed that his duty was a worthy calling, that the Emperor’s work really was being done through his sacrifice and really did mean something against the backdrop of the universe. I hope so. The same goes for Brother Ghazin. I hope he still believed when his mind was annihilated.

  And I myself have died, though only in a technical sense. I fell unconscious and my heart and lungs stopped. It was not for long enough to render me permanently dead. I do not remember any sensation of that at all.

  So, I have died now several times. Looking back it was inevitable that to have spent a life surrounded by death meant that a single death would not be enough for me. Eventually one of those deaths will be the last, but the Emperor only knows if it will be after this autoseance is completed, or during it.

  I suspect Lord Rhaye will wish to receive the intelligence I have gathered in person. I suspect it is too sensitive for broadcast. I would very much like t
o see him again. I hope I live until he gets here.

  I have completed the mandatory rest period after contacts. I must again attempt to regain contact with the residual memories in the target corpse’s brain. I shall void-safe this addendum personal entry – I do not think it would be wise for it to be read by anyone else. With luck, further entries will be less maudlin.

  – Medicae Obscurum Kalliam Helvetar

  FOUR

  Assault-Captain Zahiros

  ‘The Chaplains told us to leave our family behind,’ said Zahiros. His voice would have been lost in the howl of the wind without the vox-net, for the side doors of the Stormraven gunship were open to let the gunners deploy their mounted heavy bolters. ‘But we know that can never be true. I am the son of Kelvanah Dokhari Ban Avicann! The Kelvanah die for their brothers and persecute their foes! And as an Astral Knight, I do no less!’

  Two squads of Astral Knights were harnessed into the back of the Stormraven Damoclean, led by Sergeants Daharna of the Second Company and Ehranth of Zahiros’s own Eighth. Between the two rows of Space Marines were a dozen slaves, clinging to whatever handholds they could find as the gunship weaved between the towering structures of Borsis. These slaves, liberated by the force led by Zahiros, were next to useless in combat but were nevertheless the key to the operation. Borsis had a weakness, and the slaves knew how to exploit it.

  ‘You, Daharna!’ said Zahiros, pointing at the sergeant. ‘You were born into the Lokinsae bloodline. Duellists and soldiers without compare. I know you will not abandon the pride in your family colours, not now, not this day!’ Zahiros turned to the second squad on the gunship. ‘Brother-Sergeant Ehranth! Will you deny your duty to cover House Ghulan in glory? Or how it drives you to deliver ever greater destruction to our enemy? We have been taught by the Codex to abandon all we are when we take on the colours of a Space Marine. But we are Astral Knights. Our house banners are written on the inside of our hearts. Obsidia will tell legends of this day. Pride and fury, my brothers! Pride and fury!’