The World Engine

by Ben Counter

  It was good to know his purpose again. It was good to be so certain. Doubt had no place in a Space Marine’s mind and now it was gone.

  Kodelos knew absolutely what would happen now. When his bolter shells ran out he would fight with his combat knife. When his combat knife shattered he would fight with his bare hands. And he would die atop a heap of the slain enemy, just like in every legend of the Space Marines.

  Kodelos welcomed it as the necrons pressed closer, and every one promised him a prince’s death.

  Addendum Procedural

  My duties had held me for longer than I had anticipated or hoped. The troops and crewmen of the Varv Deliverance Mission had suffered gravely from the aftermath of the Battle of Safehold. Such an event could hardly pass without complications, but the fragility of the human mind always proves itself more debilitating a condition than I anticipate. They are not all inquisitors, I remind myself.

  Upon my return to the Madrigal 12 station I was struck by the laxity of quarantine procedures. I should have been greeted by a servitor crew, more than one of which was combat-capable. Instead I was not greeted at all. I ordered my attendants, among whom I count veterans of the Dzobelyn Massacre and shieldbearers trained by the Conclave of Tmessos, to secure the station. I myself had taken the precaution of donning my power armour, displacer field generator and chain gauntlets. An inquisitor, as my master told me, can be neither too well armed nor too intimidating.

  After confirming life support and structural integrity were no threat my attendants moved through the station to secure command and control, then the various sub-structures and compartments. This station is old and as such, while well-made and sturdy, it has many odd corners where all manner of evils might be hiding. They were swept and confirmed clear, as was the mess hall in which I was aware Medicae Obscurum Kalliam Helvetar was set up for her autoseance procedures.

  Medicae Obscurum Helvetar was unconscious in the autoseance apparatus. The servitors attending to her were on standby. I immediately summoned my medicae attendants, numbering two medicae extremis and a trauma-servitor, who reported Helvetar to be in a comatose state. They stabilised her and took her to the station’s sick bay.

  During Helvetar’s convalescence, during which she was kept in a medical coma, I reviewed the reports of previous autoseance contacts, along with the raw psychogravings via pict screen. Her progress struck me as impressive, especially given the physical and mental strain the procedure had clearly caused her.

  During this time my attendants continued to monitor the corpse of the autoseance subject, whose putrefaction had been halted, and established security protocols for the further use of the Madrigal 12 station.

  I paid careful attention to the condition of Medicae Obscurum Kalliam Helvetar. Given that it would take an unacceptable length of time to summon another Inquisitorial agent with the capacity to perform the autoseance procedure, Medicae Helvetar’s survival was crucial to the resolution of the Varv Deliverance Mission.

  I ordered sufficient provisions be transported onto the station from the Needlefang. In anticipation of my work in the Varv system being almost completed, I gave orders for the fleet to make preparations for a warp jump.

  – From the journal of Lord Inquisitor Quilven Rhaye

  Addendum Personal

  We are never taught by our masters that we must be ready to lose all those we care about, and to lose them because of decisions we have made, but we must learn to do so the moment we join the Holy Ordos.

  It is so much to ask for someone to go through what she does to herself. But she has never questioned it. I know she is afraid of the psychoconductive coil and the somatic stabilisers and I do not blame her. But she has never spoken of her fear, or asked that I give her respite from performing the procedure. What I have asked of her these last weeks has been enough to kill her, that is certain, but I cannot spare her.

  We destroy our friends. It is the sacrifice an inquisitor makes. We all die in service, but the same can be said of the Imperial Guard and the crewmen of the Imperial Navy. They do not have to offer up the people they care about on the altar of the Emperor’s will. They do not have to look those people in the eye, knowing they will one day send them to their deaths or see them broken by our enemies. That is why so few can serve as inquisitors. And it is why these thoughts cannot be broadcast to the Imperium at large. They cannot know what we do. They cannot know we are just men.

  The orderlies tell me Kalliam’s life signs are picking up. I wish she would stay comatose, and would slip away quietly.

  The man wishes that, at least. The inquisitor wants her healthy so she can plug herself back into that Astral Knight’s brain.

  TWELVE

  Chapter Master Amhrad

  The Temple of Heretics was silent. The only sound was inside Amhrad’s head, the din of battle crackling over the vox-net from halfway across the surface of Borsis. Amhrad tuned it out. He was ignorant of what was happening there, of how many of his battle-brothers were fighting and dying at the Cathedral of the Seven Moons, but it did not matter how that battle went. That it was taking place at all was all that mattered.

  ‘It’s clear,’ voxed Scout-Sergeant Faraji from ahead. Amhrad could see Faraji and Librarian Valqash between the pillars of the temple, moving through the cavernous interior.

  ‘It may be empty, Chapter Master,’ said Chaplain Masayak beside Amhrad. ‘But it will not be unguarded.’

  ‘And we may be few,’ replied Amhrad, ‘but we are not unprepared.’

  The legion of bronze necrons in the temple was gone. Where there had been hundreds of ranks of them, watched over by their enthroned nobles, now there was just a vast, empty space with a ceiling so high it was lost in the darkness. Faraji and Valqash looked tiny in the distance as Amhrad led the rest of the squad into the temple.

  Brother Kodelos in the Maxentius had paused on his way to the cathedral long enough to drop off Amhrad and his chosen officers at the Temple of Heretics. Amhrad had brought Faraji with him, the Scout-sergeant who had recovered the intelligence on Borsis’s destination from the necropolis. Hyalhi and Masayak were there as Amhrad’s closest advisors. Codicier Valqash and Techmarine Sarakos were specialists whose expertise could be valuable in dealing with whatever lay inside the temple. They were not many in number, but they had to be a small force to avoid Heqiroth’s notice, and Amhrad had chosen them carefully.

  The temple delved deeper below the surface of Borsis. The sound of the quicksilver river outside died down until the only sound was the ringing of the Astral Knights footsteps on the steel floor. The legion chamber gave way to a vast nave flanked by rows of columns, fringed with side chapels. Each chapel was dedicated to a dynasty of Borsis’s necron rulers. Carved friezes ran around the walls depicting Borsis’s history, always the subjugation of alien races and the coronation of new overlords witnessed by ranks of necron aristocrats.

  ‘It might not be why this place was built,’ said Chaplain Masayak, ‘but the xenos turned this place into a temple to themselves.’

  ‘They killed their gods,’ added Hyalhi, ‘so naturally they appointed themselves to replace them.’

  ‘No obvious ways out,’ said Faraji, ‘except the way we came.’ Faraji had scouted out the nave and was standing by the altar, an enormous vertical slab of steel covered in hieroglyphics. Not for the first time, Amhrad wondered what secrets the Astral Knights might have found out about the necrons if they could only read their language.

  ‘They were guarding more than just this,’ said Valqash.

  ‘Chapter Master,’ said Faraji, ‘just what were they guarding? We’re all here now and I doubt we’re going anywhere else. Sooner rather than later Heqiroth is going to realise why we sent the whole Chapter after him. We need to know.’ Amhrad gave this some thought, realised the Scout-sergeant was correct, and told the assembled Astral Knights what they had come there to find.

 
While they were absorbing this information Chief Librarian Hyalhi, who had known already and indeed had helped convince Amhrad of this course of action, knelt on the floor before the altar, head bowed. Amhrad recognised the Librarian turning his attention inwards, back through the architecture of his conscious mind and out into the psychic realm. Hyalhi had tried to describe to Amhrad what it was he could see with his inner eye, but Amhrad was a practical soul and he had not understood Hyalhi’s talk of threads and futures. That was why he valued Hyalhi as an advisor – he understood things that Amhrad, a soldier first and everything else second, could not.

  ‘Below us,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Something very old. Much older than the rest of Borsis. Mankind did not exist when it was buried.’

  ‘Below us?’ said Techmarine Sarakos. ‘Where?’

  Hyalhi waved a hand at the centre of the nave, indicating the space between the pews. Sarakos walked up to the space and cycled through the tools on his servo-harness’s arm, settling on an industrial cutter. A blade of caged plasma leapt from the tip of the arm and Sarakos began carving down into the steel plating of the floor.

  The rest of the Astral Knights formed up defensively, instinctively covering all the approaches to the nave, as if something could come leaping from the shadows at any second.

  Perhaps it would. They were being watched, of course. There was no way a location like this would be a blank spot in the overlord’s sight. What mattered was the time it took. If they could be quick, it might work. If they were held up here, if the necrons moved faster, they would all be dead before they had a chance to prove Hyalhi’s advice right or wrong.

  ‘Is it here, Hyalhi?’ asked Amhrad as Sarakos continued to slice away at the floor.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Destiny is so thick here I cannot see for certain.’

  ‘And do our threads end in this place?’

  Hyalhi smiled, an odd sight that Amhrad was not very familiar with. ‘Some do,’ he said. ‘Whether that is our lives or our duty, I cannot tell. I wish mine was an exact science, Chapter Master.’

  ‘Assist me,’ said Techmarine Sarakos. Masayak, Valqash and Faraji joined him at the four corners of a floor slab that had come loose. The four Astral Knights hauled the slab aside.

  There was darkness below, scattered with thousands of tiny lights, shuddering with the deep thump of vast machinery.

  Without anything being said, Scout-Sergeant Faraji was selected to be the first down. He dropped into the hole and the sound of him landing rang out a moment later.

  ‘No contacts,’ he voxed. ‘Join me.’

  Sarakos, Masayak and Hyalhi followed.

  How much would it take to stop these few Astral Knights? Not many necrons, thought Amhrad, especially if Heqiroth could send some of the lychguard or praetorians, or even the original bronze temple guard, back to the temple. A pack of flayed ones. A couple of spyders. He did not know what to expect, only that it was coming.

  It would come from the darkness, hidden from the Astral Knights until the last moment, because this was the enemy’s ground. It would sound rather like that faint clink of metal on metal, almost lost in the echoes of the Astral Knights footsteps.

  ‘Chapter Master?’ Amhrad turned to see Codicier Valqash waiting by the hole. ‘I trust you do not want to wait here alone.’ Amhrad turned back to the centre of the room and joined the Codicier.

  ‘We do not have this place to ourselves,’ said Amhrad. ‘Keep watch, Brother Codicier. Do not let them get behind us.’

  ‘Of course, Chapter Master,’ said Valqash. Though Amhrad knew all of the battle-brothers of the Astral Knights, he did not know all of them well. Valqash was one he had rarely spoken with. Amhrad knew from the Librarium’s reports that Valqash had an aggressive streak that suited the nature of his psyker power, but was untested in command. Hyalhi had wanted him there. That was enough for Amhrad. He vaulted down into the hole, bracing his knees to land heavily. The floor shook beneath him.

  Below, stretching out further than even his augmented vision could see, was an array of generators and turbines whirring and thudding away into the darkness. The air was so thick with chemicals and dust that without the filters of their armour and enhanced lungs the Astral Knights would have been unable to breathe. The air was heavy with a haze that made everything look distant and half-formed.

  ‘Those are drawing a lot of power,’ voxed Techmarine Sarakos. ‘The structure requires a great deal of it to function.’

  In the centre of the complex, ringed by the web of walkways the Astral Knights were standing on, was the heart of the Temple of Heretics, the ultimate blasphemy for which it had been built. It took the form of a scale map of the galaxy, rendered in innumerable winking lights hanging in the air, describing the grand sweep of the spiral’s arms. It resembled the galaxy that Amhrad knew from the star maps of the Imperium, but not perfectly.

  ‘There is no Eye of Terror,’ said Scout-Sergeant Faraji. He was correct. The awful distortion that mutilated one whole spiral arm, the greatest and most terrible warp storm in the galaxy, was absent.

  ‘No Maelstrom, either,’ said Hyalhi. ‘Then this map is older than the Imperium. Older than the Dark Age of Strife. Older than the Fall of the Eldar, if the histories of that lying race are to be believed.’ Amhrad walked into the clouds of stars. They parted around him, like water around the bow of a ship. In the galactic core a mass of shimmering light, a crystalline shape with thousands of facets, shone like a caged sun.

  Inside, Amhrad could make out a squirming darkness, almost blocked out by the light surrounding it – but not quite. He had an impression of eyes and mouths, of insistent, agonised movement.

  ‘This is it,’ he voxed. ‘Sarakos?’

  ‘Without the generators, the containment will fail,’ said the Techmarine.

  ‘Then distribute the melta-bombs,’ said Amhrad. ‘Valqash, stay on guard. The rest, be fast setting the charges.’

  Techmarine Sarakos had brought along a clutch of melta-bombs for the occasion, fist-sized metal spheres divided into two halves. When an explosive charge forced the halves together, the core would melt down at a tremendous temperature, liquefying anything it touched and melting through multiple layers of metal – the hull of a spaceship, the engine of a tank, the housing of a generator.

  Sarakos clambered off the walkway and dropped onto one of the generators. They were enormous vertical pillars, the gaps in the housing showing their blades spinning round rapidly. Perhaps they used geothermal energy from Borsis’s core, assuming the artificial world produced any. Perhaps they drew on some alien power source of which the Imperium was ignorant. It didn’t matter, as long as they could break.

  Sarakos, Masayak and Faraji began setting the charges, looping bundles of melta-bombs around the generators. Hyalhi dropped down after them, moving across the precarious generator housings. The drops between them stretched down into blackness – there was no telling how far the fall was. Hyalhi moved with such assurance Amhrad knew he was using a fraction of his psychic power, reading the threads of fate immediately around him to minimise the risk. Amhrad had seen Hyalhi do it dozens of times in battle and still, it never seemed normal.

  ‘Can you taste it, Chief Librarian?’ voxed Codicier Valqash.

  Hyalhi paused from wiring the melta-bombs. ‘I can,’ he said.

  ‘Metal,’ said Valqash. ‘In the air.’

  Upon his ascension to the rank of Chapter Master, Amhrad had been granted access to Obsidia’s Forbidden Armoury. There were stored the relics of the Chapter’s heroes, one of which the Chapter Master was required by tradition to carry into battle. It was the first time Amhrad had seen with his own eyes relics ranging from the Breacher of Trepanation to the power blade Daemoncarver. He had held the Helm of Contempt in his hands, and felt the coolness of its obsidian surface. But he had known none of them were for him. In the furthest corner of the Forbidden Armoury
had been mounted the twin axes known as the Wolves of Keyherdos – named after the predators hunted down by Prince Elnah Vohari Ban Koss, the same predators from whose thigh bones the axes’ hafts were made. Amhrad had fought with a sabre and swordbreaker in the duelling festivals of Port Exalt and he was most at home with a weapon in each hand.

  Amhrad drew the Wolves of Keyherdos now. The stars projected around him swam as if suddenly agitated. Surrounded by light, he was blinded to anything that might come at him from the shadows above or below. He ran out of the galaxy projection, aware of the many eyes of the creature in the crystal prison following him.

  He saw a silvery blur streak down from above, like a shooting star through a night sky. Valqash reacted fast, throwing out both hands and focusing a shining beam of crimson power through his palms. The beam scored deep across the building, slicing up through the floor of the temple above.

  But the Codicier had not been fast enough. A necron construct, too quick to focus on properly, landed on the walkway beside Valqash. It was surrounded by the swirl of a silver cloak, and Amhrad had the impression of twin blades moving in a black blur.

  Valqash’s bolter was in his hand. Bolter shells sprayed wide. The construct darted around him and suddenly Valqash’s breastplate was laid open from neck to abdomen.

  The Wolves of Keyherdos swung as Amhrad ran, feet pounding on the walkway. The construct paused long enough to turn to see Amhrad approaching. Amhrad had never seen this construct before, but he recognised it. The slaves had spoken of it.

  Judicator Metzoi, master of the triarch praetorians. Heqiroth’s executioner.

  Metzoi looked back at Amhrad. One of the necron’s eyes was gone, patched over with a triangle of polished bronze. The rest of his face was a smooth oval with a two vertical slits for a nose and one horizontal slit for a mouth, like the crudest drawing of a human skull. His armour was bronze and white, cracked and dented by warfare. The edges of his obsidian blades were so sharp they glowed a translucent blue.