The World Engine

by Ben Counter

  Codicier Valqash appeared above Masayak, hands outstretched. A ray of crackling power scored a deep charred furrow across the necrodermis covering Heqiroth’s face. Heqiroth darted back as the necrodermis reformed over the wound, and the second that bought Valqash was enough for the Codicier to grab Masayak under the arms and haul him through the sludge towards the remaining Astral Knights.

  Some had fallen. Gauss fire and necrodermis blades had cut them down. Brother Ghular lay where Masayak had left him, unconscious, sinking into the sludge. One of Squad Kypsalah – Masayak could not see enough to identify him – had lost one arm and a good chunk of his torso, burned away by gauss fire that still licked across the torn flesh and ceramite.

  Painkillers pumped into Masayak’s bloodstream. Kypsalah was giving the order to fall back. Another Astral Knight from Squad Gehesson was speared through the faceplate by a blade of necrodermis.

  The darkness was more complete the further Valqash dragged Masayak. It was only when he noticed he could not hear that he realised he was falling unconscious.

  Addendum Auxiliary

  A sub-categorisation was again detected by this functionary and investigated as before. The autoseance subject had once more isolated the secondary memory and compartmentalised it such that it could be perceived as a discrete entity within the contiguous contact. The techniques for doing so are beyond this functionary’s understanding and as such represent a level of psyniscience beyond that of the Scholastica Psykana.

  The sub-memory has been recorded here as before.

  TEN

  Chaplain Masayak

  The Astral Knights had descended as one. To the hivers, there was only one of them, an armoured giant that erupted from every doorway and window at once, that charged down every street, that turned a gun or a chainblade on every citizen at the same time.

  There had been one scream, too, ripped from a million throats. This district reached down from the skyward slopes of Hive Tertius to the border with the underhive, a vertical slice of industrial tangle home to slightly more than a million souls. Every one of them was presumed corrupted down to his or her genetics, carrier of a subtle mutation that could not be permitted to survive. It would devour Hive Tertius and then the whole of Varvenkast, and eventually, as always happened no matter how thorough a quarantine, would make it off-world to begin the cycle again on some other Imperial planet.

  The Astral Knights were the only way that cycle would be broken, and they had already begun to do it as Chaplain Masayak kicked open the hinged cover of the drainage pipe and emerged into the main factory floor.

  ‘Spread out,’ ordered Captain Vo’hel, the gruff and broad-faced officer to whom Chapter Master Derelhaan had given responsibility for this section of the afflicted district. ‘Stay in contact. If you are lost down here, you will have to find your own way back.’

  Two squads moved up on either side of Masayak. Even as he drew his bolt pistol the first mutants were falling. They were the workers on the factory floor, thousands of them lined up along the assembly conveyors to work on the precision cogitator components for which this district was known. Masayak knew well how ordinary, unaugmented people reacted to the sudden onset of danger. They did not react at all, sometimes for ten seconds, sometimes for sixty. Most kept working, fearful that if they left their posts or interrupted the production line they would be punished or humiliated.

  The mutants stood and gawped as the Astral Knights levelled their bolters at them. Masayak saw the coveralls with the coloured trim indicating the vast majority of these people were from Varvenkast’s void caste, those of stock that had been on the planet for a generation or less. Only after several generations of residence and service to the social system of this world could their descendants be born into a caste that might afford them habitations with light or hot water, or the prospect of one day working somewhere other than the manufactoria floors.

  Not that these people would have any descendants.

  It was a point of pride that no one citizen should require more than a single shot. That was what twenty of the workers got in the first volley, twenty bodies ripped open by twenty bolter shells, falling back onto the conveyors and being dragged up into the machinery to be stamped or twisted to unrecognisable shapes.

  People were starting to scream. Most were stunned by the gunfire and the sudden sprays of blood across their faces.

  ‘Give thanks,’ said Masayak, his voice amplified through the carved teeth of his skull-faced helm, ‘for we are swift.’

  Some were running now. They were shot down next. One vaulted up onto a bank of machinery and Masayak shot him through the small of the back with his bolt pistol – the man was dead before he hit the ground.

  Other Astral Knights squads were moving in from other directions. Those who fled upwards would meet the taskforce led by Derelhaan himself, moving down through the district. Those who headed down would hit the force coming up from the underhive, led by Captains Ifriqi and Koledos. Those who fled sideways, trying to reach the neighbouring districts, would find their fellow hivers had barricaded every passageway and thoroughfare. There was no way out. There could not be. This was a cull of a mutant bloodline, and they all had to die.

  The Astral Knights advanced through the manufactorum floor, over the conveyor and through into the workers’ quarters. Here, in identical chambers set side by side like a stack of shipping containers, the people of the district spent the scant hours when not working. It looked like nothing so much as the cell block of a prison. Thousands of similar blocks housed the great majority of the district’s people, and likewise the bulk of the Astral Knights’ work would be done in places like this.

  The squads split up, each taking a different level of the block, and then into ones and twos to cleanse a particular corridor or junction. At these close confines, it was expected that a combat knife or a bare fist would do the job. Two brothers moved ahead of Masayak, kicking the doors off their hinges and killing whoever they found inside. No kill took more than three seconds.

  Masayak glanced into the ruptured doorways. Each cell was of the same dimensions, with a bed and toilet. The workers ate communally, in long, low mess halls already being sanitised by other squads. What they did most in their cells, other than sleep, was pray. Each one had cheap painted icons and pages from holy books on the walls, or a framed portrait of a saint propped up on a packing crate as a homemade shrine.

  There was nothing so foul as the heretic who wore a disguise of piety.

  The foreman’s quarters were ahead, branching off from the main cell block. The two Astral Knights ahead took another branch of the cell block and left the foreman’s quarters for Masayak. Masayak shouldered open the double doors.

  Inside was a rather grander suite. Several rooms branched off from a reception hall dominated by a bronze statue of Governor Rheydolmar. False stairways led up to framed oil portraits of Hive Tertius aristocrats. Masayak kicked through a door leading to a dining hall, with a long table laid with gold and silverware – it was empty. The bedchamber, with a curtained four-poster bed and endless layers of dark red upholstery, was also abandoned.

  At first glance the trophy room looked inhabited only by the stuffed animals glowering in their glass cases – a shaggy, horned quadruped from Varvenkast’s frozen tundra, a creature something like a snake with a dozen clawed legs fringing its long spiral body, a pair of birds with hunched vulture-like heads and plumage of silver blades. But Masayak caught movement behind a wooden display case showing off hundreds of glittering insects and butterflies. He drew his crozius, not bothering to activate the power field.

  Behind the case was a man. He was elderly, with a neatly trimmed greying beard and a more elaborate version of a workman’s uniform. One of his eyes had been replaced with a functional bionic of lenses and brass cogs. His uniform had a high collar and leather ruff, and coloured panels that echoed the slashed sleeves of a hive spi
re noble.

  ‘Stop,’ the man gasped. ‘You do not know. You have been used! We are…’

  Masayak closed the distance with the foreman in half a stride. He cracked his crozius into the side of the blasphemer’s head and heard the neck snap. The foreman toppled full length on the floor, his head twisted at an impossible angle and the side of his skull caved in. Blood already spread across the wood panels of the floor.

  The man had been reaching for something in his uniform. The front of it was hanging open and the man’s fingers had not quite stopped spasming. Masayak assumed the glint of metal was a weapon with which the foreman had hoped to defend himself.

  It was not. It was a symbol of polished metal, hanging around the foreman’s neck. The symbol was of a shark, curved over into a circle. In the centre of that circle was an owl gripping a lightning bolt.

  Masayak had seen it before. He had seen it flying from a banner over Port Exalt.

  The shark, owl and bolt stood for daring, wisdom and fury.

  The symbol of House Janiak of Obsidia.

  Addendum Personal

  Is it possible to know anyone more completely than by experiencing his memories?

  I knew my family. I could anticipate their actions and sometimes guess at their thoughts. Those with whom I trained in service to the Holy Ordos of the Inquisition were close to me too, for we had to be close if we were to succeed – sometimes, to survive.

  But I have never been as close to anyone as I have to the body lying on its slab in the autoseance suite. I have never spoken to this man. I have never spoken to any one of his kind, and if I was presented with a living Space Marine in the flesh I would be as likely to flee as to try to strike up a conversation. But I have been inside this man’s memory. Though I have found plenty in there that did not come from him, I also know I have seen through his eyes and let his thoughts into my mind.

  I will never speak to him. I have not even confirmed his identity. And while I have performed autoseance procedures on individuals about whom I knew much more, I have never experienced their memories with such immediacy and intensity as I have during these sessions. My previous contacts have been seen as if through a distance or during an ever-present fog. Sounds have been muffled and each sensation experienced as if through a thick layer of clothing. But these sessions, they have been real.

  I have experienced a bullet punching right through me. I know what it feels like to bleed to death. When it comes to the memories of the subject himself, I know what it means to have all those experiences crammed within me until my mind is full to bursting. I have felt my skull strain at the seams as if it was about to break and all those memories pour out in a crimson flood.

  In recuperating from these last sessions, I have felt less and less like Kalliam Helvetar and more like an empty vessel into which has been poured the substance of countless others. Kalliam is just one of those people. A far greater presence is the autoseance subject himself. I know him better than I do the woman named Kalliam. Could he come to completely subsume her, so I remember nothing about her and do not experience what she feels or thinks? Is that one of the many risks of the autoseance, which no one fully understands?

  Perhaps this autoseance will end me, but not through my heart stopping or my brain haemorrhaging. Instead I will simply cease to exist and another mind will think and feel in place of mine. It would be a curious sort of death. Perhaps no one will notice. It would be my duty to accept it, just as if it was by sword or fire, in the pursuit of the Inquisition’s purpose.

  But for all I claim to know and accept the consequences of my duty, I am scared of what will happen to me. I wish I knew no fear as the Space Marines did. I know how that feels, too, for the memories I have experienced have considered fear to be an alien thing, an invasion of the soul like possession by a spirit, and I can begin to understand how Space Marines do the things they do. It is one of the few comforts I can take from the contacts I have made, and when I have awoken and am Kalliam Helvetar again, that comfort is gone. Kalliam knows fear. She knows it very well.

  My time of prayer and remaking has come to an end. After I have cleansed my body and completed the mental exercises in preparation, I shall attempt primary contact again. I am very deep now. I do not think this subject has much more for me. I sense there is much he keeps locked up, even in death choosing what I can and cannot see. His is a mind of the most extraordinary discipline, and dying did not change that. I am full of admiration for him, but I am horrified when I think of what he must have done to his mind to make it possible.

  I know him better than I know myself, but there is an ocean of memories he chooses not to give to me. I am used, I am thwarted, I am terrified, by this mind. And though I can make some guesses, I am not even completely sure of his name.

  – Kalliam Helvetar

  ELEVEN

  Brother Kodelos

  What beauty Borsis had could only be appreciated from the air.

  From the cockpit of the gunship Maxentius, Borsis was a crazed sculpture of steel, like an immense metallic expanse scrimshawed by a divine silversmith into a pattern too complex to reproduce. The features of the planet had been hurriedly named as the Astral Knights encountered them, and this area had been dubbed the Labyrinth Wastes. It was a stretch of iron plains carved deep with interlocking canals that served no apparent purpose save to form an impenetrable maze stretching between the horizons.

  Perhaps it was indeed a maze, and served as a defence to discourage besieging of the structure at the centre of the Labyrinth Wastes. The slaves called it the Cathedral of the Seven Moons. From the cockpit of the Maxentius, Brother Kodelos could see why. Seven gleaming silver orbs circled around the peak of a great mountain-like structure, a cluster of pinnacles growing in height towards the centre until the tallest spire reached past the orbiting spheres and touched the lowest edge of Borsis’s cloud layer. The whole cathedral had the shape of a pyramid covered in spines, as if it was an enormous creature preparing for a predator’s bite by sprouting hundreds of quills. Where everything around it was grey metal, the Cathedral of the Seven Moons was plated in ivory panels with flashes of the purple and sea green of the Nephrekh dynasty.

  The spheres slowly orbited the peak of the cathedral, and Kodelos could make out sensor arrays and banks of lenses mounted on the polished curves of their surfaces. They were observatories, always peering through the cloud into the void. The Cathedral of the Seven Moons was the eye of Borsis.

  ‘I see troops massing along the southern edge,’ said Kodelos’s co-pilot, Brother Phaleron. Phaleron had lost the upper half of his face, and seemingly his capacity for joy and sense of humour, in a fuel leak and fire ten years before. His twin bionic eyes were plugged directly into the gunship’s control console, taking in the stream of information from its sensors. ‘Numbering three to five hundred. Support walkers and anti-grav artillery among them.’

  ‘Relay it to the strikeforce command,’ said Kodelos.

  Glowing runes were projected onto the cockpit’s windows, overlaying the view with tactical information. Hundreds of red blips lit up around the cathedral’s threshold – the necrons streaming out of the cathedral, identified and tagged by the gunship’s cogitator. The gunship had been forged on Mars in an age when the more complex marks of cogitators were still being manufactured. The machine-spirit of the gunship was agile and intelligent, and proved able to take in and calculate battlefield data far more quickly than a Space Marine. They did not make them like that any more – they had not for several thousand years. Kodelos found himself hoping the Maxentius would make it off Borsis. The Imperium had the capacity to create new Space Marines, but when the Maxentius was gone, there would never be another.

  ‘You’re coming in over our position,’ voxed Captain Khabyar from below. The captain of the Ninth was in overall command of the strikeforce. ‘I trust your mission was successful?’

  ‘They were
delivered intact,’ replied Kodelos. ‘But very uneventfully. Not nearly enough mayhem.’

  ‘Then you will be glad to know,’ said Khabyar, ‘the enemy have all chosen to greet us at once.’

  ‘How honoured we are,’ said Kodelos. ‘I am glad we chose to return the favour.’

  ‘Stay high and keep your eyes down,’ said Khabyar. ‘I need your intelligence for the moment, not your guns. I will tell you when that changes.’

  ‘Understood, brother-captain.’ Kodelos could see the column of Astral Knights moving across the Labyrinth Wastes, directed through the dense steel canyons by their auspex scanners and by the topographical maps being sent to them by the Maxentius’s machine-spirit. From this height they were no more than insects with white carapaces. That distant, tiny hint of movement represented the pride of Obsidia, the Emperor’s finest, thousands of years of glory, sacrifice and war.

  The Astral Knights were making their last move of the war on Borsis. They were attacking Overlord Heqiroth in his stronghold, the Cathedral of the Seven Moons. They were ending this fight one way or another. All of them.

  ‘Best of luck, my prince,’ voxed Captain Khabyar.

  Kodelos had been addressed as that many times among the Astral Knights, always in that same mocking tone. And he always gave the same reply.

  ‘Same to you, peasant.’

  The lightning rail had demonstrated to the Astral Knights the existence of mass transit on Borsis. It was the means by which the necrons had moved their contingents of warrior-constructs around the districts of the planet. Some of the slaves had been taken by the lightning rails from one set of labours to the next, and were able to lead a team accompanied by Techmarine Sarakos to one of the interchange stations. Amhrad had given orders for Sarakos to seize control of the lightning rails. It did not need to be permanent, only long enough for the various strikeforces to converge. Sarakos worked fast, and Borsis’s transport system was under the invaders’ control for as long as it took the necrons to respond. That was all the time Amhrad’s plan needed.