The World Engine

by Ben Counter

  Hyalhi caught the sense of another thread, one that he had followed since the Astral Knights had first joined the Varv Deliverance Mission. It carried with it billions of souls, each one insignificant, but together making up a weight that scored a bright line across Hyalhi’s psychic senses. It was the thread representing the fate of Varvenkast. In the past, not so long ago as the universe reckoned things, Varvenkast’s fate had been changed with a sudden and awful certainty, a knot that dripped with malice and sorrow. In the near future Varvenkast collided with Borsis, and what happened afterwards was obscure. Hyalhi had followed this thread often enough. He let it pass. He knew how it ended, in that he could not know. Whatever the end entailed, it involved a greater magnitude of destruction than a human mind could encompass at once.

  Fate ran down through the palace, and into whatever lay below. History had its own sensation, a taste of steel and blood, a touch like something electrified – these were the threads that determined the pattern of the galaxy, the crossroads where all outcomes were decided. The crossroads was below the Palace of the Magadha. Hyalhi could no more walk away from it than he could fly into the sky and through space.

  Hyalhi reeled his mind back in. The structure of the palace fell into place around him, plunging through the weft of fate to form the outer walls, the innards, the narrow passageway and the flight of dark steps in front of him.

  ‘Chief Librarian?’ asked Apothecary Saahr. ‘Your orders?’

  ‘Down,’ said Hyalhi.

  It was a tomb, it was a temple, and it was a prison. The vast structure was embedded deep in the crust of Borsis, all black metal and polished stone-like surfaces riddled with glowing circuitry. The flight of steps opened up onto a circular walkway that ringed the inside of a titanic central chamber, the intricate angles of its construction forming a sphere of geometric shapes. It was big enough to have served as a hangar for an Imperial battleship, one of the ancient war engines two kilometres long. A city could have hung within that space. A Space Marine’s enhanced vision could reach all the way across. It was like a landscape without a horizon, disorienting and alien.

  In the middle of the immense spherical chamber was a cube of necron steel. It was the size of the Astral Knights fortress-monastery that towered over Port Exalt on Obsidia. Patterns of light rippled over the xenos-forged metal. Around it hovered the faces of past lords of the Magadha dynasty, rendered in immense size as the necrons of Borsis chose to depict their rulers. They slowly orbited the cubic vault, their dead metal eyes endlessly scanning the walls. The gaze of one icon, that of a necron with no mouth-slit and a headdress that hung discs of engraved gold around its skull, seemed to pass over the Astral Knights emerging into the chamber from above.

  ‘I give up,’ said Brother Felhidar as he stepped out onto the walkway. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘A place that Heqiroth would surely have destroyed,’ said Hyalhi, ‘had he known of it. And a place of which Turakhin has neglected to inform us.’

  ‘We know the necrons have a religion,’ said Saahr. ‘Or had one, at least. If they have a temple to anything but themselves, then this is it.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Hyalhi, ‘they say they killed their gods.’

  ‘Then this is the tomb of a god?’ said Saahr.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Hyalhi held up a hand as if testing the direction of the wind, though the air here was still.

  ‘Give me an enemy,’ said Felhidar grimly. ‘Give me a witch to imperil my soul or a beast to tear me asunder. But give me no more puzzles.’

  Hyalhi stepped to the edge of the walkway. He estimated it was well over a kilometre down to the lowest point of the sphere, where a cluster of machines sent pulses of green light around their coils.

  He stepped off the edge. The brothers of his honour guard could do nothing to stop him. The enormous necron face flew past him and he was in freefall.

  He slowed and stopped. Hyalhi was hanging in midair, a few hundred metres below the cube. The anti-grav field created by the machine below, the same one that held up the necron icons and the cube itself, had caught him and buoyed him up.

  ‘Please, Chief Librarian, tell us before you do things like that,’ voxed Saahr. ‘Not all of us can see the future.’

  With a kick of his feet Hyalhi propelled himself upwards. He could feel now the sensation he had detected when he first set foot on Borsis, struggling from the ruins of the Tempestus. It was an underlying feeling, like the quiet note that ties together all the elements of a symphony. It was almost impossible to hear on its own and Hyalhi had lost it many times as he tried to read it, though he had been certain it was always there. Now it was louder and more concrete, and this close to the vault Hyalhi could pick it out and hold it firm.

  It was a message. It was not a psychic communication – nothing native to Borsis was psychic, Hyalhi was certain of that. Instead it was the echo of a force of will that bent reality around it as a planet bent gravity, just perceptible to a psyker’s mind. And like the gravity of a planet, weak though it might be, for it to have reached him at all indicated a truly immense presence. Hyalhi listened to the message, and heard what he had known he would hear.

  Help.

  ‘Burhan, Felhidar, join me,’ voxed Hyalhi. ‘The rest, cover us. I must get closer.’

  The two Astral Knights jumped from the walkway and fell, caught a second later by the anti-grav field. A Space Marine was trained to function in zero gravity but it was still disorienting to have the ground beneath his feet one moment and to be floating freely the next. The two kicked their way closer to Hyalhi as Hyalhi rose further towards a necron icon circling over him.

  Hyalhi grabbed the edge of the icon and kicked himself off its back surface towards the cube. The closer he got the more he could pick out the necron hieroglyphs formed by the energy running across its surface. They existed only for a moment before vanishing again to be replaced with more writing. Perhaps it was the history of whatever entity this place commemorated, a tract of philosophy, a eulogy, a curse against intruders. Hyalhi wished, not for the first time, that one among the Astral Knights could read the hieroglyphics. The key to fighting the necrons lay deep in their history, the fathomless past where all the threads of their fate began.

  Burhan and Felhidar reached the icon. Hyalhi was close enough to touch the surface of the enormous cube. He felt its power thrumming through the ceramite of his gauntlet.

  ‘Chief Librarian,’ voxed Saahr, ‘do you know what is inside?’

  ‘I will soon,’ replied Hyalhi.

  The hieroglyphs squirmed around his hand. Bright lines of light radiated out, dividing the surface of the cube into sections. The sections shifted and angled outwards as the whole cube began to open up like a vast and intricate puzzle box. Hyalhi kicked himself clear as the cube opened up to reveal a gallery of painful bright light inside, a mass of chill fire. The temperature plummeted and Hyalhi felt beads of ice crystallising on the inside of his faceplate.

  Hyalhi’s visual augmentations reacted to the light, shrinking his pupils to the size of pinpricks. The glare resolved into a mass of technology, crystals of glowing datamedium nestling among panes of squirming living metal. A host of bright silver scarabs scurried across the crystals, drawing the metal into long tendrils that waved out towards Hyalhi like the fronds of a sea anemone.

  ‘Get out,’ voxed Felhidar from behind Hyalhi. ‘Get out of there!’

  ‘Hold position, brothers,’ replied Hyalhi.

  Fate looped around him as if its threads were seeking to tie him up and drag him towards his future whether Hyalhi wanted it or not. Everything ran through this place and time – Borsis, Varvenkast, the Astral Knights, and so much more only visible as vast continents of the future shifting dimly in the distance. Hyalhi held out his hands and let the living metal entwine them. The metal seeped in through the joints of his fingers and wrists, reaching like streams of ice up under his shou
lder guards and across his chest. Hyalhi felt his lungs contract and his breath shorten.

  The cold was profound. Hyalhi had fought in the vacuum of space and on worlds that had never seen a sun, but this chill pushed deeper through his body than that. He felt it injecting through the ports on the black carapace, the implant over his ribcage that allowed his power armour to interface with his body.

  Then it reached his brain.

  He could feel the tiny silver filaments worming across the inside of his skull. He could feel the alien thoughts crowding out his own, a jumble of chaotic information his human mind could not comprehend. For a moment he tried to force it out, for every psy-discipline session of his training had emphasised how he must protect the weapon of his mind with every moment. But Hyalhi forced down that instinct and let the alien in. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them they were blinded by a film of silver.

  Hyalhi knew that where he stood was not real in the sense that it was not a physical place. It was, however, real in all the senses that really mattered. He could, for instance, die here.

  It was likely that this place was, in fact, composed of data spread throughout the various systems of Borsis. It suited Hyalhi, however, to comprehend it as existing within the cubic vault, the innermost cell of a labyrinthine prison to which the scarabs and the threads of fate had led him. To Hyalhi’s mind it appeared a vast shadowy space, a cathedral to darkness or the immense tomb of a king who sought to emphasise his status with emptiness.

  The only light was a faint glow without apparent source that pooled in the middle of the floor. Overhead Hyalhi had the impression of huge moving masses, the vast mechanisms of Borsis grinding down through the planet’s core, fuelling the weapon housed at the planet’s equator and providing the power to repair and animate its necron warriors.

  Hyalhi approached the light. His senses took a moment to react to the absence of the glare from inside the cube – now they amplified the light until he could make out the shape of an ill-proportioned creature crouching on the floor.

  The creature’s flesh was grey and lumpy, with a strange wet and malleable consistency. It resembled a skinny and long-limbed humanoid in shape. It was covered in furrows and scars. Three gnarled fingers spread out across the floor. The ridge of its spine stood out as if it had been starved.

  The figure looked up as Hyalhi approached. The movement dislodged lumps of its grey flesh and they thudded to the stone floor. There were no bones or organs underneath, just more wet grey matter, as if the creature was formed entirely from ragged clay.

  The face had three eyes arranged over a lipless mouth. A headdress of tarnished gold dug into its scalp. Mountings for gemstones were empty. The eyes were dull ovals of cracked amber.

  ‘What are you?’ asked Hyalhi.

  ‘I am a god.’

  ‘The necrons killed their gods.’

  The creature smiled. Particles of clay broke away from its face. Its voice was like dust. ‘They lie. We cannot be killed. But we can be broken.’

  ‘I have never had much love for riddles,’ said Hyalhi. ‘I tell them, I do not solve them. Speak plainly or I will be gone from here and you will never have what you wish from us.’

  ‘I am a god of the stars,’ said the creature. ‘Long ago the necrontyr begged us to save them. They had blundered into a war they could not win. The war against the Old Ones, the War in Heaven. Your kind cannot comprehend it. Your kind think in years, do they not? The single orbit of a world around its sun? It was millions of years ago. Your kind had not evolved then. Even before you existed, the necrontyr faced their extinction and they begged to be saved. And mine is a generous species.’

  Hyalhi was a difficult man to lie to. Few people could lie to a Space Marine’s face at all, let alone a psyker. In addition Hyalhi could sometimes see the immediate past and future winding around a man, and could tell when his words did not match up with the truth fate was telling him. Here, however, there was no fate. The veil was hidden here, as if he was in a place that existed far away from both real space and the warp.

  ‘To them you were a god,’ said Hyalhi. ‘But to me you are one more xenos.’

  ‘And what does it matter?’ replied the creature. ‘We lived off the stars and at our will they were extinguished. The necrontyr called us gods, and so we were gods. They named us the c’tan. They built bodies of living metal so we might move among them. We promised them eternal life, and we gave it to them. We promised them victory in the War in Heaven. And before us the Old Ones were scattered and exterminated.’

  ‘I have seen your eternal life,’ said Hyalhi. ‘I have felt the echoes of it from the distant past. You ripped away their souls and remade them as these constructs, these parodies of life!’

  ‘They begged it of us!’ retorted the c’tan. ‘The necrontyr were defined by their deaths. Their bodies eroded beneath the sun of their world. Their lives were short and spent preparing for death. They built necropoli that reached the heavens while they scraped an existence in the rocks and sand. We freed them from death! We delivered to them the galaxy! And they betrayed us!’

  Hyalhi could feel the alien’s hatred. It was not his psychic senses that detected it. The warp barely noticed the c’tan’s presence. Anyone, psyker or not, would have felt the cold fire of its hate prickling at their skin.

  ‘They turned the weapons we made for them against us,’ continued the c’tan. ‘Borsis was one of them. This world I built with my own hands, it was aimed now at me! In the moment of victory the necrons sought to destroy us but they could not. All they did was break us into shards and imprison each one. Some they cast into space, some they enslaved. I, Yggra’nya, the forger of planet and star, a slave to the race who have us to thank for their existence.’

  Yggra’nya. The name Brother Ghazin had spoken the last time this creature had made contact with the Astral Knights. The god of Borsis.

  ‘And now,’ said Hyalhi, ‘you want to be free.’

  ‘I am the enemy of your enemy,’ said Yggra’nya with a thin, ragged smile.

  Hyalhi looked up to the distant churning machinery. This was an echo of Borsis’s heart, and though it probably looked nothing like this in reality he was reminded of the sheer scale of the Astral Knights’ task. Their purpose was to destroy this world. Was that really something they could do alone?

  ‘You are not the only ally we have,’ said Hyalhi. ‘You presume to be negotiating from a position of strength. You presume that we need you.’

  ‘Turakhin will betray you,’ replied Yggra’nya, spitting out the necron’s name.

  ‘And you will not?’

  ‘What does a god care about humankind?’ Yggra’nya waved a dismissive hand. ‘I was here before you and I will be here when you are gone. Even as species go you are but nothing, a stain on the galaxy like mould. You will die out or be washed away, and the c’tan will not notice. Why bother betraying that which can do me no harm?’

  ‘The necrons did you harm,’ said Hyalhi.

  ‘Once,’ replied Yggra’nya. ‘No species shall ever turn on the c’tan again.’

  Hyalhi circled the c’tan slowly, like a scientist observing a specimen. ‘This form,’ he said, ‘was carefully chosen. You wished to elicit sympathy so you decided to appear crippled. And this vault of shadows suggests the cruelty of your prison. But of course, you must remind us of the power you once had, and the power you hope to wield again, so you still wear the trappings of a king. You might have once had a god’s power but your understanding of a human’s psychology is crude at best. Do you think the Astral Knights will be swayed by an appeal to our pity? We pity nothing. We were raised to ignore the misery of the weak on our home world. Before we ever don the armour of a Space Marine we have long since failed to feel sympathy for any but our own.’

  ‘Refuse me and die,’ said the c’tan. ‘It is not a threat, is it a truth you already know. Turakhin wi
ll betray you. Be it he or Heqiroth, the lord of Borsis will swamp you with every necron warrior on this planet. You cannot run from them forever, your brothers will be surrounded and butchered. The necrons might lose a thousand for every one of yours but your lives will still run out first. Tell me this is not true, Astral Knight.’

  ‘And what will you do, Yggra’nya, when Borsis is destroyed?’

  Yggra’nya held its hands wide in a gesture of reason and honesty. ‘I will find a galaxy that appreciates a benevolent god.’

  ‘The first thing you should have learned when planning to negotiate with humans,’ said Hyalhi, ‘is that we spit upon the alien. Even if he does claim to be a god.’

  The shadow vault was dissolving. The machinery was drifting apart, cog by cog, replaced with indistinct darkness. It was the absence of information, like the static on an untuned pict screen. The c’tan became hazy, too, its form streaked with interference.

  ‘Refuse me and die!’ called out Yggra’nya as the vault fell apart around it and it sank into darkness. ‘Varvenkast will die! And your oath will be broken!’

  ‘What do you know of our oath?’ demanded Hyalhi.

  But there was no reply, for the connection was severed and the shadow vault was gone.

  Addendum Auxiliary

  During the last contact, a layer of perception was located that did not correspond to the chronological series previously comprehended. This layer was consistent with autoseance training suspects who possessed vivid memories of an emotionally significant or traumatic nature that were replayed or re-experienced in times of extreme mental stress. That a member of the Adeptus Astartes might succumb to such extremes of stress would previously have been unthinkable to this functionary, but given the contents of the associated contacts she now thinks it possible.