by Ben Counter
Chapter Fourteen
'Give me a gun that never fires! Give me a sword that is ever blunt1. Give me a weapon that deals no wound, so long as it always strikes awe!'
- Ecclesiarch Sebastian Thor, address to the Convent Sanctorum
THE IMPERIUM WAS founded on ignorance. It was a truth so obvious that very few ever acknowledged it. For more than ten thousand years the Imperium had claimed rulership over the human race, first under the Emperor and then under the Adeptus Terra who acted, it was claimed, according to His undying will. But the Imperium existed in complete historical isolation. Before the Emperor had set out on the Great Crusade that conquered the thousands of scattered inhabited worlds, there was nothing.
Legends inhabited the shadowy years of pre-Imperial history. No matter how many scholars slaved over the question of what had gone before the Imperium, it was impossible to tell the guesswork from the lies. A very few basic assumptions were held by the majority of those who paid pre-Imperial history any mind at all, though even these were in constant question.
First, there had been the Scattering. The discovery of faster-than-light travel through the parallel dimension of the warp had led to massive migrations among the stars, creating a galaxy-wide diaspora of humanity. The Scattering was pure conjecture, a way of explaining how so many worlds inhabited by humans were even now being rediscovered by Rogue Traders and exploratory fleets. But it was the only way the human race could have got into its present state and so it was widely assumed to have happened so far in the past that no direct evidence of it existed.
Then there came the Dark Age of Technology. Mankind, rather than venerating technology and keeping it sacrosanct as the priesthood of Mars later did, pursued technological advancement with wanton enthusiasm. Astonishing wonders were made, along with horrors beyond imagining. Planet-threatening war machines. Genetic abominations. Machines that wove whole worlds around them. And worse things - far worse.
Inevitably, the Dark Age led humanity to the Age of Strife, where human fought human in an endless cycle of destruction. Warp travel became impossible and the result was a great winnowing of the human population, where worlds were isolated and fell into the barbarism that would often only end when the Imperium recontacted them and sent missionaries to bring the light back to them.
But some, it seems, must have known the Age of Strife was coming - a very few who believed humanity's existence was in danger and that by preserving the most stable and useful technology for future generations, they could increase the chances of the human race surviving the coming slaughter. No one in the age of the Imperium could begin to guess who that might have been, but they were undoubtedly among the greatest minds of the Dark Age, perhaps the only ones who realized the toll that profane technology would take on the galaxy.
They placed their knowledge in a form that could survive forever and be understood by anyone. Certain key technologies were reduced to algorithms and placed in a format that could be used even by humans reduced to barbarity. They were the Standard Template Constructs.
In a way, the Priesthood of Mars had done something similar, preserving technology through religious observation. With the birth of the Imperium and the Treaty of Mars, the Adeptus Mechanicus was able to explore the galaxy with the Great Crusade and learned of the existence of the Standard Template Constructs.
So pure were the STCs that they became objects of holy veneration to the tech-priests, nuggets of the Omnissiah's genius compressed and formatted for the good of mankind. A few fragments were discovered on shattered, ruined worlds during the Great Crusade. The tech-priests used them to create some of the most stable and ubiquitous technology the Imperium had, like the Rhino APC or the geothermal heatsink technology that provided power to countless hive cities. But they never found a complete, uncorrupted STC.
A pure STC was a hopeless legend. To think that one could survive complete for so many thousands of years of tortuous war was fanciful in the extreme. But that did not stop many tech-priests from pursuing the Standard Template Constructs as the objects of religious quests, sifting through legends and half-truths, sending out exploratory parties to the most distant, Emperor-forsaken planets hunting for the merest hint of the ancient knowledge.
One such tech-priest was Archmagos Veneratus Scraecos. On the forge world of Salshan Anterior he had led a seminary studying the legends of the Standard Template Constructs and creating complex statistical models from the fragments of information the Mechanicus possessed.
Scraecos had come to Chaeroneia, believing that there was a Standard Template Construct on the world. And perhaps - just perhaps - he had been correct.
ALARIC CRAWLED FORWARD on his stomach, forcing his huge armoured form down into the mass of rust beneath him so he wouldn't give himself and the tech-priests alongside him away to anyone who might be guarding the top of the mineshaft.
The shaft sloped up at a steep angle, allowing only a dirty half-light in from the outside. Drilled into iron-rich rock centuries before, the walls and floor of the shaft were now sheathed in metre-thick sheets of crumbling rust.
'We're close.' said Tech-priest Gallen, clambering up the slope alongside Alaric. Gallen's only weapon was a rusting autogun and whatever combat attachments his equally rusted bionics might possess and he was scared. Antigonus's tech-priests had lived on the edge of detection and death for a long time, but they had always shied away from direct conflict with the Dark Mechanicus. Now Alaric's arrival had prompted them into all-out war.
'Is there anyone up there?' whispered Alaric. He glanced back and saw his squad close behind him, the gunmetal of their armour dulled by the dirt enough to hide them. There were about twenty other tech-priests, too, all in various states of disrepair, along with Antigonus in his spider-legged maintenance servitor body, Hawkespur and her lone tech-guard bodyguard, and Archmagos Saphentis.
'Nothing on the auspex.' said Gallen. 'But some of their tech-priests don't show up.'
'I'll take point.' said Alaric. The tech-priests might have been spirited resistance fighters but the Grey Knights were better soldiers by far and he waved his squad forwards to the top of the shaft.
The desert air stank. This desert was not natural -it was built up from untold millennia of pollution, made of drifts of hydrocarbon ash or expanses of radioactive glass. Every forge world had these desolations in common, toxic deserts or acidic oceans that stretched between the manufactoria. Large sections of Chaeroneia had resembled hell before the Dark Mechanicus had ever taken control.
Alaric crawled towards the smudge of dirty sky visible through the top of the shaft. Archis scrabbled up beside him, Incinerator held off the ground in front of him.
'Ready?' asked Alaric.
'You can never be ready.' said Archis. 'The moment we think we're ready, that's the moment the Enemy finds some new way to kill us.'
Alaric pulled himself up the ragged rock around the shaft entrance. The night sky above flickered with half-formed images, the occult symbols and blasphemous prayers written on the clouds by projectors on the top of the city's spires. They loomed down over the desert, too, a blanket of heresy covering everything. There was no break in the images because the clouds formed a solid unbroken layer, as if trying to shut out the existence of a sane universe beyond.
Alaric pulled himself level with the shaft entrance and looked out. He had some idea of what to expect - rolling toxic dunes, foul lakes of raw pollution, carrion creatures wheeling overhead.
He didn't see any of that.
Outside, Manufactorium Noctis was a massive construction the size of a spaceport. It was ringed by a series of spindly watchtowers each bristling with guns and in turn protected by networks of trenches and gun emplacements. Between the watchtowers stretched an expanse of rockcrete studded with biomechanical outcrops like immense blooms of fungi - workshops and warehouses, generator stacks and control bunkers, connected by thick twisting conduits like bundles of nerves or muscle fibres.
Dead-grey masses of flesh grew up everywhere, reaching up the sides of the watchtowers, flowing into the defensive trenchworks, blistering up through the rockcrete like infected boils. Furthermore, a ribbon of bright silver marked the very outer borders of the facility beyond the trenches and watchtowers -it looked liquid, like a moat, the first line of defence against intruders.
But that was not the worst of it. The worst was the army that stood to attention, arrayed in ranks across the rockcrete. They towered over the biomechanical buildings - distance could be deceptive but to Alaric's practiced eye they were all between thirty and fifty metres high and in spite of their obvious biomechanical infections there could be no doubt as to what they were.
Titans. Hundreds of them.
The Adeptus Mechanicus's fighting forces, the tech-guard and the Skitarii, could be formidable, as could their spaceships and the massive Ordinatus artillery units they could deploy. But nothing in the armoury of the tech-priests could compare in symbolic power to the Titans. They were bipedal fighting machines that some said echoed the Emperor himself in the inspiring magnitude of their destructive power. Even the smallest, the Warhound Scout Titans, could muster more firepower than a dozen Imperial Guard squads.
Titans were god-machines deployed to break through fortifications and shatter enemy formations. There was little that could stand against them. And more importantly, the Titan Legions ranked alongside the Space Marines themselves as symbols of Imperial dominance.
'Throne of Earth.' whispered Archis. 'They must have been building them for., for...'
'A thousand years.' said Alaric. There were too many Titans for Alaric to count - they seemed to be mostly equivalent to the Reaver-pattern Titan, the mainstay of the Titan Legions. Roughly humanoid in shape, each sported a truly immense weapon on each arm, along with countless smaller weapons bristling from their legs and torsos. Many of the weapons were unrecognisable fusions of mechanics and biology.
Alaric tried to get a better look at the facility itself. A single spire rose from the centre, taller than the rest, topped with a large disc studded with lights -perhaps the control spire for the facility. There were also tall chimneys belching greasy smoke into the sky, probably from forges beneath the surface where the massive metal parts needed to build and maintain the legion of Titans were smelted.
The landscape around the facility was scarred by the effort that had gone into digging a stable foundation into the ash wastes. It must have taken the full resources of Manufactorium Noctis to build the place and even now it was draining most of the city's power. The fact that it still needed so much power suggested very strongly that the Dark Mechanicus were still building and assembling Titans in the bio-mechanical workshops.
And there was more than just power. Alaric could feel the malevolence he had first tasted from orbit, dark and pulsing through his skin, strong enough to turn the air heavy and greasy with its power. It was here. The dark heart of Chaeroneia was beating somewhere among that Titan army.
Magos Antigonus crept up beside Alaric's Grey Knights. 'Omnissiah preserve us.' he said as he saw the facility rolling out in front of him. 'They must have moved the titan works. Stone by stone, girder by girder. The whole thing. How stupid I was to think they would just dismantle it. This was what they had been building all along and I was too blind and afraid to venture out and find it.' Even through the crude vox-unit of his servitor body, Antigonus's regret was obvious. 'I promised I would make them face justice.' he said. 'Instead I let them build... this.'
'It doesn't matter.' said Alaric. 'What matters is what you do now. This is our chance to hurt them. All of them at once. Maybe stop what they came into real space to do.'
Hawkespur had reached the shaft entrance, too, along with Saphentis who was, at least, making a token effort to stay hidden. 'Of course.' she said, as if she should have guessed the titan works were there from the start. 'This is what the Chaos fleet is here for. The Dark Mechanicus are making a deal with Abaddon, just like they did with Horus. The Titans are here to seal it.'
'So we destroy them all?' said Alaric.
'It seems the only option.'
'That.' said Saphentis, 'will be difficult.'
'I don't remember our orders saying it would be easy.' replied Hawkespur crossly.
'Nevertheless, it seems futile to pursue a goal we cannot possibly fulfil. The chances of our force successfully destroying so many Titans, even if they are not operational, is so close to zero as to be incalculable. The Dark Mechanicus will certainly become aware of our presence and divert all of their resources to stop us. And unlike in the city, there will be nowhere for us to hide.'
'Then what do you suggest?' asked Hawkespur.
'Find a way to leave this planet.' said Saphentis. 'Give up?'
'Give up. We all represent a significant investment of Imperial resources. Dying while pursuing an impossible goal will hardly coincide with the Emperor's will you claim to serve.'
'Hawkespur?' said Alaric. 'You're the Inquisitorial authority here.'
Hawkespur pulled herself to the edge of the shaft entrance to get a better look at the Titan Legion and the defences of the facility. What she couldn't see, of course, were the many thousands of menials and tech-priests that could descend on them after the facility reported any intruders.
'We go in.' said Hawkespur. 'Our primary objective is the Titans. If they really are destined for the Eye then even taking out one will help. Our secondary objective is to gather information on the workings of the facility in case we find some way of completing the primary objective without sabotaging them all one by one. Other than that, we do what we can and die well. Any objections? Aside from the obvious, archmagos.'
'I submit to the will of the Inquisition.' said Saphentis, his artificial voice displaying little conviction.
'Alaric? You're the one who's going to have to do the fighting.'
'We go in. As you say, even taking out one will hurt them.' 'Good. Antigonus?'
'You'll only pull that Inquisition business on me if I refuse.' said Antigonus. 'And I think it's time we took this fight to them. I can reconnoiter the defences, they'll have a hard time telling me apart from another feral servitor.'
'You'll die if they do.' said Hawkespur.
'In that respect, interrogator, nothing has changed.' Antigonus crawled out from the shaft entrance and began the trek down the ragged surface of fused ash towards the quicksilver ribbon that marked the edge of the titan works. His servitor body was streaked with rust and looked like it had been decaying out on the ash dunes for decades. It was a good disguise. The best on Chaeroneia.
'TAKE COVER! INCOMING fire, full evasion protocols in effect!'
Magos Murgild's voice boomed through the verispex decks. A bewildering tangle of exotic equipment, incense-wreathed tech-altars and long benches of bizarre experiments, the verispex deck was a bad place to get caught when the shells started slamming home. But that was where Nyxos was at that moment, grabbing hold of a massive steel laboratory bench as the Exemplar began to shudder.
Tech-priests were thrown to the ground. Chalices of chemicals were thrown around and enormous glass vessels shattered. Nyxos stayed on his feet, the exoskeleton hidden beneath his robes straining to keep him from being thrown around like a toy. Massive explosions boomed from outside the ship, warning klaxons sounded from a dozen different directions and the already murky lighting flickered as the ship's systems were wracked with fire and shrapnel. The verispex labs were used for research into samples brought in during the exploration missions the Exemplar had been built for and they made little concession to keeping the research magi safe when the ship came under fire.
'We need to move now!' shouted Nyxos above the din. 'Can you do it?'
'Not... not yet...' replied the nearest tech-priest. Nyxos hadn't had time to leant the tech-priests' procedures or even their names, or to check whether they might have been in thrall to Magos Korveylan. But none of that mattered. What mattered was time
.
Nyxos had one chance to help Hawkespur and Alaric on the surface. This was it.
'Not good enough!' replied Nyxos. 'You!' He pointed to another tech-priest, apparently a woman somewhere under the dataprobes and fine manipulator attachments. 'Boost the signal. Get the power from wherever you can.'
'It may not hold...'
'It's better than not trying. And you!' Nyxos rounded on the first tech-priest again - apparently the lab supervisor, he sported bizarrely large round ocular attachments which magnified his naked, unblinking eyeballs several times. 'Encode the transmission. I don't want to hear excuses.'
'But the projector channels from Chaeroneia's historical logs are a hundred years old. There is every chance they have changed...'
'Then we will fail, magos. I am willing to accept that responsibility. I know it's something you tech-priests find difficult but you are playing by Inquisition rules now. Encode it. Send it. Now.'
The huge-eyed tech-priest stumbled over to the deck's main cogitator engine. A clockwork monstrosity the size of a tank, it was apparently powered by a large round handle which the lead tech-priest promptly began taming with all his strength.
Pistons and massive cogs began working pumping and spinning through large holes in the cogitator's elaborate brass casing. More explosions sounded, closer this time and Nyxos knew the last of the shields were gone. That meant the fire from the Desikratis was now chewing its way through the hull and decks would start failing pressure chambers would be breached, ship systems would be shutting down. People would be dying. Many people.
Space combat was something Nyxos hated with a passion. It could only end when crews - not ships, crews - were completely wiped out. It was long-distance butchery. Even the most minor ship-to-ship combat was the equivalent of an entire battle among ground troops in terms of fatalities and the battle for Chaeroneia would probably claim the lives of every single Imperial servant in orbit.