She looked back at the dish in front of her, clamped in place with brass arms, studded with a dozen calibrated injectors and sensor-bulbs. She considered the contents, its flaws and its virtues, and what could be done about the former while preserving the latter. She reset the amniotic layer, ready to run the charge through it again.
Sanguinary obsessive trait B, she inputted onto the cogitator’s mind-wafer. Will attempt to rectify. Again.
Before she could depress the lever, a pulse kicked into her temple-set comm-bead. She considered ignoring it – the research was at a delicate stage – but then remembered what was at stake. She cancelled the injection, pulled the electrodes out of the solution precursor and flooded the dish with refrigerant. Then she checked the secure transmission.
‘I received your request,’ came Ilaed’s thin voice. ‘Very well, if you must. But be quick.’
So he’d agreed. Good. There had never been any guarantees.
‘Complying,’ she sent back, and pushed away from the station. It took a few moments to decouple her neural plugs, and then she was walking down the long aisle, her shoes clicking on the stone floor.
No one watched her go. The rows of faces, hundreds of them, remained fixed at their stations, illuminated by pale blotches from below. The only sounds were the scratch of auto-quills, the clicking of the machines, the faint bubbling of the amniotic tubes. The atmosphere was reverent. Almost religious.
Ironic, she thought.
Liora reached the outer portal, submitted herself to the security sweep, then went to the pulse-shower chambers to shed her protective gear and change into her standard uniform. As ever, when she peeled the synthskin from her hands, the flesh underneath was puffy and livid with irritation. She stepped through the scanners, pressed her fingertip to the pheromone reader, waited patiently for the blood-sample needles.
Then she was out, still within the Dungeon confines, but beyond the steel-trap perimeter that guarded the chambers where the real work was actually done. The guards were still numerous, as were her fellow technicians, but the surveillance level dropped a fraction. She looked up, to where ranked standards of the Raptor Imperialis hung listlessly in the humid air. It got to you, after a while, being enclosed all the time, never seeing the open sky. She had heard stories of technicians going mad, having to be dragged off by the attendants, never to be seen again. She had even considered how possible it would be to fake an episode, just to see where all the invalids ended up. Of course, she had her great purpose now, and that made the monotony bearable.
She walked with surety, for the readiest way to attract attention was to give the slightest hint of uncertainty. Gradually, the crowds thinned out. She was heading for the lower storage depots, where flesh-and-blood adepts were increasingly outnumbered by lumbering, wafer-automated forklifts. Some of those spaces were huge, and you couldn’t even see the roof from the floor. Some were off limits and sealed with heavy blast doors. Every inch of it all was drenched in paranoia and need-to-know mysteriousness – the subterranean city of secrets.
She reached her destination – a nondescript metal portal with the usual range of security seals and retinal-scan appendages. She slunk into the door-well, pressing herself up against the inner edge.
‘Here now,’ she pulsed over the direct link. ‘Access, please.’
It took a while for the command to come through – no doubt they all had to go carefully, too. Then, one by one, the locks slid open. The scanner blinked out, and the seals broke. Liora pushed the access panel lightly, and the door hissed open. She slipped inside, and the perfect dark slid over her as the door closed her in.
She stood for a moment in the shadow, waiting for her breathing to subside. She could already smell some of what she had come to find – stacked up neatly, ready for inspection. The only remaining task was to check the manifests were accurate – this was the last batch, and so after that everything would be ready to go.
Then, for some reason, she sniffed. It should have been musty in that chamber, clogged with the stale air that filled every storeroom on the level, but there was something else. Something like… incense.
Before she knew anything more, lumens came on, flaring like torches. She tried to scrabble back through the door, but the locks seemed to have jammed tight. She blinked, only making the dazzle worse. Despite that, she was able to notice two important, and unexpected, things.
First, the chamber was empty of its expected cargo. There were no storage crates on the floor, though from the scratches on the rockcrete it looked as though something had been there at one stage.
Second, she was not alone. The other occupant was gigantic, a third taller than her and far bulkier. Even blurred by her watering eyes, she could see just what had been caged in here with her, and it made her want to gag with terror.
‘Technician Liora Harrad, Class Tertius,’ said Samonas calmly, keeping his usual civilised distance. ‘I think it is time that you and I spoke candidly.’
Seven
Night, out in the wastes. The land was sandy and flat, a blasted bowl of scrub and dust that got in the teeth and made the skin itch. The stars shone vividly above, untempered by light pollution, a pinprick mess of ivory against the deep ground of the void. The moon was a waning crescent, making the distant hills a soft blue-blush under the dark.
Achilla limped up the rise, feeling his joints – both original and mechanical – ache. His fatigues hung a little too loosely over his frame, these days. Once he had bulked out his battle-kit well enough. He’d looked good in it, and that had meant a lot to him. Things were meant to be more civilised these days, but he had always found truth in the old adage that girls liked a soldier. He’d been a lot of places, a lot of encampments, shifting with the campaigns that never seemed to truly stop, and it had been plenty of fun. Despite all the changes, a few things remained constant in war – the alcohol, the boredom, the time to kill. And between those lulls, spent in shot-dives and amasec-dens with an arm around someone friendly, there was the sudden thrill of it all kicking off again.
Achilla liked fighting very much. In the earliest days he’d done it for money, giving him what he needed to buy those few good augmetics from the flesh-stitchers in the Mumbay-Rashstra combines. For a long time that had been good business, and all he’d needed to do was stay alive. His right eye was an oculus-targeter, his right hand was underpinned by a tungsten core, and both legs had been stripped out and rebuilt with musculo-dermal boosters. He’d resisted getting pain-dampeners threaded into his nervous system, because they dampened pleasure too, and that had been more of a priority in those days.
Those had been the good times. Wars were frequent, short and localised. No one had enough power to stamp out anyone else, not properly, and so everything was a matter of skirmishing and burning – quickly over, quickly paid for. He couldn’t remember when it had started to change. Someone a long time ago had told him of an emperor from the south – or maybe the west – who was steadily chewing up the little kingdoms. It might have been Yulia, or maybe Elenora, but whoever it was he hadn’t paid much attention, for there were always stories of emperors chewing up the little kingdoms, whether out of wishful thinking or dread, depending on your perspective.
This time, though, it had been a real one. Work started to dry up, and for the first time Achilla had to travel to find it. Borders started to be drawn, ones with watchtowers and patrols. The parameters of life got smaller, just as the fighting got harder and less fun. Armies started appearing with much smarter uniforms and much bigger guns. Worst of all, they were being paid not by results, but as professionals.
After nearly dying in that business off the Arabyn Depression, there had been some serious thinking to do. It turned out that most people hadn’t really liked soldiers at all – they had just been the ones with the coin and the weapons – and so things had got perilous. There was a mood of vengeance in the air. The good times wer
e thought of, by worrying numbers of individuals, as really bad times, and there were stories of lynchings doing the rounds.
So Achilla did what he’d always done, and adapted. He went east, then north, keeping his augmetics wrapped up and out of view, slowly running down his coin reserves from the last big job and looking for a way out. Everywhere he went, it was the same story – the Emperor, the Emperor, the Emperor. The more he travelled, the more his eyes were opened. They were building things again – cities, ports, factories. The little kingdoms really were falling, toppling faster every year, their resources and their populace swallowed up into this great beast of an empire that seemed to be suddenly everywhere at once.
The Imperium, they were calling it. There was a whole language being resurrected with it, full of baffling ranks and stations, and a single icon flying on a thousand different standards – an eagle’s head, ringed by lightning. People seemed to like that emblem. Where those standards flew, the dull hand of order was restored.
It was a grim spectacle, but not one to be challenged, at least for the time being. Achilla found an Imperial regiment recruiting in the industrial zone of the Rohinj hyper-conurb, and spent the very last of his coin scrubbing out the worst signs of his past life. He needn’t have bothered with that, it turned out – the requirement for soldiers was almost inexhaustible, and the officers paid very slack attention to where their recruits came from. They had little choice, to be fair, for Terra was awash with lots of Achillas, all of whom looked much the same as one another and had the same dreary stories to tell.
So the fighting started up again. It wasn’t as entertaining now, as he had to slot into battalions and follow orders. Still, he got paid. He saw more of the world, which was being moulded and remade at such a rate that no one knew quite what to think about it, save those terrifying warriors of the new Imperium who strode across its bounds like gold-clad sentinels of a forgotten age.
Achilla even saw one of them once, from a distance. He should have been concentrating on his own fighting – advancing up the course of a dried-out irrigation canal to assault a derelict pumping station – but once you caught a glimpse of one of those golden devils, everything else seemed slightly pointless. He’d used his old augmetics to get a better view, and so from a range of almost three kilometres he’d watched the whole thing unfold.
He couldn’t even count the number of enemies that it had killed. He couldn’t even really see how it was doing it, the pace was so fast. The devil wasn’t using a gun, like anyone sensible, but some kind of electricity-wrapped spear. It was carving through solid stone, slashing through the masonry as if it weren’t there. A rusty old tank was kicked over – kicked over – and then pulled into shreds of burning metal.
Achilla found himself appalled. That level of naked power was… unfair. There could be no enjoyment in it. There was no chance that the other one might strike a lucky blow. There was no indication at all that any money was changing hands with those things, which was an aberration – fighting for its own sake, without a decent reward for services rendered, was the most perverse inclination of all.
So he’d turned the augmetic off, and got back to what he was supposed to be doing. And yet, he never forgot. In the cities, they were flying those eagle-head banners and celebrating the return of civilisation, but out there, in the deserts and the ruins, at the sharp end, monsters were being set loose. It didn’t matter that they were clad in gold and crimson, that they looked like something noble and refined, because nothing noble and refined could do those things. It was a sham, and Achilla knew all about those, because he’d been on the other end of them more often than not.
He kept his head down, after that. He went where he was told. He didn’t pay too much attention to the names and the places, for the less you knew the better. He started to drink to forget, not for fun, and that had predictable consequences. He aged. His implants started to ache. His story, as ignoble as it was, was most evidently coming to an end.
He drifted into the margins. It turned out that there were others who didn’t entirely appreciate the way things were going. Some were malcontents and thieves, some were mad; others were like him and had never really fitted in anywhere. Others, he discovered, had more thoroughgoing concerns. Slowly, by a process he was barely aware of, he found himself right on the edge, ripe for the whispers that still ran through the rapidly cleaning air, if you knew where to listen.
Loyalty was a strange thing, Achilla thought to himself. He’d never thought of himself as loyal to anything much, and yet, here he was, back where he had started, doing what he’d done all those many years ago. Now, the danger was greater. Far greater. The chances of him surviving the year were slimmer than they’d ever been. Still, at least he was having fun again. That was the important thing.
He slipped, his ankle twisting over a rock as he limped to the crest of the rise. He leaned on his jag-rifle – an archaic weapon almost as tall as he was – and caught his breath. The air was cold, and would get rapidly colder as the night deepened.
Below him, spread out in the rift valley below, was the forward detachment. The night air tasted of promethium, and thrummed with the low growl of hundreds of engines idling. Sodium lamps twinkled amid the dark hulks, betraying the movement of thousands of infantry marching. On the side, protected by twin lines of heavy armour, the supply transports waited silently. Seeker drones prowled overhead, black as pitch and near silent.
Achilla felt a pulse at his neck. Sniffing, he reached for the tracker at his belt. His thumb moved stiffly over the ident patch, betraying that curse of age. It took a moment for the comms coil to clear out, and then it was glowing – a simple message, one they had been waiting weeks for.
He stared at it, checking that it was definitely the right one. He felt his creaking heart pick up, beating harder, just like the old days. His leathery face cracked into a smile.
Right on cue, hundreds of engines coughed into smoggy life. The drones whined down low, ready to be stowed away in their carriers. Vehicle headlights flared out, casting long pools of dirty gold across the moonlit steppe.
We’re doing it, he told himself, happily, limping down the slope towards his own carrier. As he went, he double-checked the power-unit on his rifle, and the act itself gave him a surge of pleasure.
The first transports were already moving out. It would take hours just to clear the staging point, such was the volume gathered here – cast-offs, renegades, ne’er-do-wells of all kinds, bolstered by the true believers – but the journey would feel like a short one.
We’re doing it, thought Achilla, hurrying to join his unit, never even knowing, nor caring, where the order had come from, for such things had never mattered to him, only the essential core of it.
On the march again. Just as it ought to be.
In the beginning, there had been no High Lords.
The empire, in its earliest days, had only required generals, and few enough of those. The Emperor had always been present, and He was the central star around which all else revolved. For many, the Emperor and the Imperium were virtually synonymous, the one a reflection of the other. That was a simplification, but it captured one essential truth – that without Him, there were no substantial differences between this new power and all the other ones that had briefly risen to prominence before. In the language of the old logicians, the Emperor was a necessary component of the Imperium, though hardly sufficient.
Then, of course, there was Malcador. Malcador and the Emperor, the Emperor and Malcador. No one knew who had come first. The rumours were legion. Some said that Malcador had been the Emperor’s very first gene-creation. Others said that they were twins, one gifted power and the other gifted cunning. Others said that Malcador had travelled the Earth collecting shards of a greater whole, and had created the Emperor
as a gestalt being of infinite power. Rumours persisted that shamanic rites had been conducted, though by whom, to whom and with whom was never easy to determine. Many half worshipped Malcador. Many more secretly hated and feared him, and told stories that he whispered lies into the Emperor’s ear in order to keep the poor downtrodden and seize riches for himself.
With Malcador, the only thing that was certain was that he knew the stories, had a hand in spreading them, and was careful to ensure they were all false. The essence of Malcador was that he had no essence – he was a shadow, a memory, a pale reflection of the greater soul who walked beside him. His power, which was colossal in itself, was that of deflection and uncertainty. The Emperor would level a mountain with a word of truth. Malcador would erode it over a thousand years of lies.
Then came Valdor, the golden champion. Though a member of the triumvirate in appearance, in truth he was the servant to the others. He was the standard bearer, the cup-holder, the skull-bringer. If there were doubts about the origins of the two principals, there was none about him – Valdor had been made, created from mortal Terran stock. Perhaps there had been other captains-general, or failed attempts to create one, but he had been the one that had lasted. He had been the one that had set the template, afterwards never broken, for the Legio Custodes. If Valdor had been a different man, perhaps the Custodians would have been different, too. He was dour, reserved, quietly spoken, intelligent and dry. So were they all, too. Maybe that was the result of the manner of their creation, or maybe that was the influence of their captain. Nature, nurture. Even for demigods, the old debates could still rage.
Below those three, for a long time, there had been nothing. Soldiers, scientists, builders, artisans, yes, but no statesmen, no counsellors. They were not needed, at the start, for who could compare with this original trio of supernaturals? What advice would such leviathans take from the unwashed mass of a cowed and brutal humanity?
Valdor: Birth of the Imperium Page 6