by Dan Abnett
It might even be beautiful. He’s not sure. He has no expertise in such determinations.
They can see it from ten kilometres away. The Erud Highway passes it, linking to the Holophusikon’s own feeder roadways, and the township of service buildings and garrisons. Numinus City resolves as a gleaming skyline on the horizon.
The Holophusikon is stately, immense, planted in the open space of the plains. Though there is an ample town of buildings around it, it still looks new, as though it has just been built and is waiting for a city to sprout around it.
Or it looks as if it has been sent into wilderness exile for punishment.
The rain has stopped, briefly. The wind is up. The light catches the monolith’s sunward faces, bright. The other aspects are deep brown shadows. Its perfect geometry is emphasised.
Approach roads are avenues hung with banners that jump and flap in the wind. Golden masts, gilt canopy poles, lamp stands. The banners bear the heraldry of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, of Terra, of the Imperium, of the XIII. Ventanus hasn’t seen so many banners in one place since he last looked at picts of the Triumph at Ullanor.
There are gardens in the ground too. They are very green. Irrigation has dragged water from the Boros River out into the arid plains to create an oasis. Pools shimmer. Hydration systems fill the air with spray. Miniature rainbows form. Palms nod.
‘Slow down,’ says Ventanus.
They ride up under the flapping banners, and through the cool darkness under a grand arch, and coast into an inner courtyard. There is a great flight of steps like the processional advance to a temple. More banners drape from the walls of the inner precinct. There are other vehicles in sight, and dots that are people dwarfed by the immensity of the enclosure. Motorised staircases with ceramite treads flow silently on either side of the main flight.
They dismount. The speeder wobbles like a small boat as their weight leaves it. Liveried footmen approach to take care of the vehicle.
Ventanus starts up the steps, his sergeant behind him. He unclasps and removes his helm, breathes unfiltered air, feels heat and light on his face.
‘The Holophusikon,’ says Selaton.
‘A universal museum,’ says Ventanus.
‘I understood that.’
Ventanus has little patience for, or interest in, such places. He is prepared to admit that this is a flaw in his character.
They arrive at the top of the towering flight. A standard human being, even an exceptionally fit one, would be slightly short of breath at the end of such a climb in the sunlight. If anything, their pace is faster by the time they reach the top.
A marble platform, a broad entrance. Beyond, a huge and airy stone space, lit by natural light through slots in the roof. Cool. The spacious echo of murmured voices.
Ventanus approaches through the broad entrance. It is rectangular, landscape in form. A vast slot. The lip of the doorway overhead is thirty metres wide.
There are a few other visitors, tiny clumps of figures in the vast interior space. Ventanus is struck by the scale of the space, by its hollow, empty sound. Around the edges of the great chamber there are alcoves, podiums, plinths, displays. The exhibits, he supposes. That’s where the visitors are. Why build such a vast space and then dot the few exhibits around the edges?
‘What is this supposed to be?’ asks Selaton.
‘I don’t pretend to understand curation,’ replies Ventanus.
More liveried footmen approach them.
‘How may we serve, sir?’ asks one.
‘Ventanus, Captain, 4th Company, First Chapter, XIII,’ Ventanus replies. ‘I am looking for–’
He has memorised the names.
‘–Seneschals Arbute, Darial and Eterwin. Or, in fact, any senior municipal servant whose portfolio encompasses the starport.’
‘They are all in the building,’ the footman replies. He is clearly being fed behind the eyes by some direct-to-retina datasystem. Ventanus can tell from the slightly glassy way his eyes de-focus to verify the names.
‘Could you fetch them?’ asks Ventanus.
‘They are in session all afternoon,’ replies the footman. ‘Is it urgent?’
Ventanus chooses his next word carefully. It’s not so much the word as the hesitation he places in front of it, the hesitation that says I am wearing battle plate, I am armed, and I am doing my very best to be polite.
‘Yes,’ he says.
The footmen hurry away.
The Ultramarines wait.
‘Sir, is that–?’ Selaton starts.
‘It is,’ Ventanus replies.
Ventanus walks towards the distant figure that they have recognised. The figure is kneeling in front of one of the exhibit plinths. Attendants wait for him at a respectful distance.
The kneeling figure sees Ventanus and gets up. The gears and motors of his armour hum. He is taller than Ventanus, broader, the bulk of his plate master-crafted and finished with expansive golden wings, lions, eagles. He is leaning on a broadsword that is fully the height of a standard human.
‘Lord champion,’ Ventanus says, saluting.
‘Captain Ventanus,’ the giant replies. He eschews a salute, hands off the mighty sword to a bearer, and clasps Ventanus’s steel-cased hand between his own.
Ventanus is flattered to be recognised by such an august person.
‘What are you here for?’ the giant asks. ‘I thought you were running the Erud muster.’
‘You are well-informed, tetrarch,’ says Ventanus.
‘Information is victory, my brother,’ the tetrarch says, and laughs.
Ventanus explains his errand, the diplomatic function.
The tetrach listens. His name is Eikos Lamiad. His rank is tetrarch and also Primarch’s Champion. The four tetrarchs represent the four master worlds that command the fiefdoms of Ultramar under the authority of Macragge: Saramanth, Konor, Occluda and Iax. Lamiad’s fiefdom is Konor, the forge world. The tetrarchs are the four princes of Ultramar, and they rule the Five Hundred Worlds, standing in the hierarchy of power below Guilliman and above the Chapter Masters and the planetary lords.
‘I know the seneschals,’ says Lamiad. ‘I can introduce you.’
‘I would appreciate that, my lord.’ Ventanus replies. ‘It is a matter of expediency.’
Half of Eikos Lamiad’s face, the right half, is heroically handsome. The other half is a pale porcelain blank seamlessly embedded into the flesh, an elegant estimation of the missing face. The left eye is a gold-pupilled mechanism that winds and counter-circles like an antique optical instrument.
Lamiad was grievously wounded during the defence of Bathor. Shuriken shrieker rounds blew his skull apart and dismembered his body, but the worshipful Mechanicum elders of Konor Forge rebuilt him, respectful of his service and his good governance of their world holding.
It is said he would inhabit a Dreadnought chassis now, but for their ministrations.
‘Do you like the Holophusikon, Ventanus?’ the mighty champion enquires. His entourage of servitors, bearers, aides and battle-brothers is silent and stoic. All of them are in rich, ceremonial dress.
‘“Like”, lord?’
‘Appreciate, then?’
‘I have not given it much thought, lord.’
Lamiad smiles, the half of his face that can.
‘I sense a reservation, Remus,’ he says.
‘If I may speak candidly?’ Ventanus says.
‘Do.’
‘I have been to many worlds, lord, Imperial and not Imperial. I have, I think, lost count of the number of repositories of all wisdom I have been shown. Every world, every culture has its great library, its archive of wonders, its data store, its trove of lore, its casket of all secrets. How many ultimate archives of all universal knowledge can there be?’
‘You sound jaded, Remus.’
‘I apologise.’
‘Cultural archiving is important, Remus.’
‘Information is victory, lord.’
‘In
deed,’ says Lamiad. ‘We need to store our learning. We have also, during the Great Crusade, learned vast amounts by acquiring the archives of compliant cultures.’
‘I understand the–’
Lamiad raises his hand, a soft gesture.
‘I wasn’t reprimanding you, Remus. While I acknowledge the import of careful data gathering, I am also tired of the overly reverential way in which places like this are regarded. Oh, another holy repository of the most secret secrets of all, you say? Pray tell me what secrets you might keep that I have not learned from a thousand crypts just like this?’
They laugh.
‘You know what I like about this one, Remus?’
‘No, lord. What?’
‘It’s empty,’ says Lamiad.
The Holophusikon was commissioned thirty years before, during the development of Numinus City. It is younger than both of them, younger than their careers. Construction work has only recently been finished. Curators have just begun to import objects and data for display and storage.
‘They are usually so old, aren’t they?’ Lamiad remarks. ‘Dusty tombs of information, closed and guarded for unnumbered centuries, with special keys, and special rituals to get in, and all that tedious mystery. What I like about this place is its emptiness. Its intent. It is a proposition, Remus. It’s a great undertaking that looks forward, not back. It is open, and ready to be filled with mankind’s future. One day it will be a universal museum, and perhaps it will stand, alongside the libraries of Terra, as one of the greatest data repositories in the Imperium. For now, it is an ambition, built of stone. A deliberate statement of our intention to establish a robust and sophisticated culture, and to maintain it, and to record and measure it.’
‘It’s a museum of the future,’ says Ventanus.
‘Well said. It is. A museum of the future. For now, that is exactly what it is.’
‘And that’s why you’ve come here?’ asks Ventanus.
Lamiad shows him the exhibit he was inspecting when Ventanus arrived. In a sterile suspension field is the stabilised corner of a fire-damaged banner. Body heat triggers the hololithic placard, revealing origin details.
It is part of the banner that Lamiad carried on Bathor. This exhibit, one of the first few hundred chosen, honours him and his achievement, and commemorates that great battle.
‘I have tours of service planned that will take me from Ultramar for at least ten years,’ Lamiad says. ‘I felt I should come and see this before I embarked. See it with my own eyes.’
He looks at Ventanus.
‘Well, with my flesh eye and the one the Mechanicum made for me.’
They talk of the muster for a while, and of the coming campaign. Neither of them mentions the XVII.
Then Lamiad says, ‘They say Calth will be named a major world soon. It is developing fast, and its strengths are evident. The shipyards. The fabrication. Its status will be upgraded, and it will control a fief of its own.’
‘I will not be surprised,’ replies Ventanus.
‘It will have its own tetrarch too,’ says Lamiad. ‘It will have to. As a major world, it will be obliged to appoint a military governor, and produce a champion and a champion’s honour guard for the primarch.’
‘Indeed.’
‘There is talk of Aethon. Aethon of the 19th. As a potential candidate for the post.’
‘Aethon is a fine candidate,’ Ventanus agrees.
‘There are others in consideration. There is, I am told by our beloved primarch, some art to the choosing of a tetrarch.’
‘And it can’t be a tetrarch, can it?’ says Ventanus. ‘Perhaps you will all become quintarchs once there are five of you?’
Lamiad laughs again.
‘Perhaps they will coin another title, Remus,’ he says. ‘One that is not numerically specific. Calth won’t be the last, merely the next. Ultramar grows. As we meet the future and fill this Holophusikon, we will have more than Five Hundred Worlds, and more than five fiefdoms. Like the emptiness of these halls, we must be ready to accommodate the changes and the expansions to come.’
He turns. Figures in long, pale green robes are approaching them, followed by attendants.
‘Here come the seneschals,’ says the Primarch’s Champion. ‘Let me introduce you so you can get your business done.’
6
[mark: -16.44.12]
At the orbital Watchtower, Server of Instrumentation Uhl Kehal Hesst communes with the noosphere.
The code is speaking. It is gabbling.
The pleats of his floor-length Mechanicum robes are so crisp, he looks as if he has been carved by stone-masons. He stands at the summit of a Watchtower that is similarly straight and slender. The tower casts its shadow across Kalkas Fortalice, the armoured citadel that faces Numinus City across the glittering width of the Boros. It is a cauldron of walls and castellated towers, a city in its own right, but a place of defence, a lifeguard set to stand at the shoulder of Numinus and protect it from harm.
Ten thousand people work in the Watchtower, and another fifty thousand function in the gun towers and administration buildings around it. It is alert, a sentient place, its noospheric architecture designed on Hesst’s forge world, Konor, and supported by technologies supplied directly from the fabricatories of Mars.
The Watchtower’s command deck is vast, and bustling with staff. Windows, their blast shutters raised, gaze out across the river and the city to one side, and out towards the lowlands on the other. Hesst can image the traffic at the starport, the dust raised by marshalling on the plains, the bright land and the storm-tinted sky, but he is not interested in the view.
The tower supports its own manifold field, and is inloading data to him and the other seniors at a rate equivalent to the noospheric broadcast of eight hundred Battle Titans. Sixty moderati of the highest quality, working in amniotic armourglas caskets set into the deck, help to cushion that flow and parse it for comprehension.
From this deck, from this summit, Hesst can issue – by means of a simple code command across his permanent MIU link – the order to commit the planet’s weapon grid. Two hundred and fifty thousand surface-based weapons stations, including silo launchers and automated plasma ordnance, plus tower and turret guns, field stations, polar weapon pits. He can activate the immense void shield systems that umbrella Calth’s principal habitation centres. He can bring on-line the nine hundred and sixty-two orbital platforms, which include outward-facing protection systems and surface-aiming interdiction networks. Furthermore, he can harness and coordinate any and all available forces on the ground, and any fleet composition assembling at high anchor or in the shipyards.
Which means that, today, because of the conjunction, Server Hesst has immediate personal control over more firepower than Warmaster Horus. Or, it’s conceivable, the Emperor himself.
This consideration does not impress Server Hesst, or fill him with anxiety. Hesst is aware, however, that Magos Meer Edv Tawren is reading his elevated adrenal levels.
Tawren is young and efficient, tall, fully modified. She has excelled in her advancement through the developmental levels of the Mechanicum, and is profoundly good at her work. She supervises the Analyticae. Hesst is fond of her. He seldom accesses his emotions, but on the rare occasions that he decides to use them, he always notices the warmth with which he perceives her. Her modifications are technically pleasing, and her base organics possess a certain aesthetic.
“You are running hot”, she blurts to him in binaric code, a microsecond transmission on the intimate direct mode. It is non-verbal, but the blurt contains code signifiers for Hesst, and for a Titan battle unit straining its drives.
“Not at all. Rumination: Today is simply demanding.”
Tawren nods. She is ghosting his overwatch. He is aware of her presence in the manifold at his shoulder, just as she is standing next to him on the deck in the fleshsphere. Her fingers are trembling, touching invisible keys, coordinating data via the subtle haptics. Today’s difficulty is no
t shooting at things.
With two fleets in conjunction, traffic density above Calth is singularly high. Virtually all of it is moving according to non-standard or adjusted traffic patterns, extraordinary situational shifts of movement, course and proximity that are not coded into the regular watch registers. This is a one-time thing, for one day only: their responsibility is the safe and assured orchestration of a vast armada.
Calth’s weapons grid has multiple redundancies and stratified forms of cross-check and authorisation. It cannot be abused or used in error by any single individual: not Hesst, not the forty other servers in the Watchtower, not the six thousand two hundred and seventy-eight magi and adepts stationed planet-wide, or the garrison commanders of the Army or the local divisions. Nothing can happen without his personal consent.
Every time a ship arrives, or moves, or passes another, or joins formation, or enters a yard, or docks, or begins to refuel, or begins a sunward circuit to certify its drives, an alarm sounds. Every non-standard motion or manoeuvre system-activates the grid, and Hesst has to reject a firing query.
It’s actually the most superb test and demonstration of Calth’s grid, but it is becoming tiresome. From the summit of the Watchtower, Server Hesst controls the effective firepower of a major fleet, that firepower distributed across the surface and orbit. The system is hyper-sensitive, so that nothing can take it by surprise and secure an advantage. Every non-standard movement triggers an automatic firing solution from the grid, which Hesst has to personally reject in discretionary mode. He’s currently getting between eighteen and twenty-five a second.
Tawren knows that standard Mechanicum operating practice under such conditions, as advised by both the forgemasters of Konor and the exalted elders of Mars, is to temporarily bypass the multi-nodal automatics of the grid‘s alert processors and, for the duration of the fleet manoeuvres, transfer approval control to the automatic stations. Let the sentient machines of the platforms shoulder the burden. Let them cross-check the constant inload of data. Let them verify the anchorage codes and the traffic registration marks.