Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley

by Warhammer 40K

  He was there, that was all that mattered. The ship’s impending departure ceased to be of such importance, as time slowed so that his mind might match with the machine-spirit’s processing speeds. So far he had encountered only the pure souls of machines, not the… other. He prayed it was dead, and began to feel justified in keeping the full secrets of the vessel from the captain. Had he revealed what he had feared to them, they would have destroyed the hulk outright. But there had been no need to worry after all.

  A world within a world, encompassed by the craft’s great data matrix. The STC core. He trembled before its binary portals, his augments struggling with its complex interfaces. Before such beauty his own implants were an apish mockery of true technology. Before all this, he felt less than a man.

  And then he was into it. A rare recognition coding he had incorporated into himself from a third-generation copy of an STC mega-miner. Somehow, it worked, like recognised like.

  He felt his sanity writhe in the grasp of his will. He strained to keep himself whole. The assembled secrets of mankind’s technology lay open to his mind and the magnitude of that threatened to destroy him.

  Mastered, he struggled to bring his thoughts down to the sluggish pace of the outside world and open a line of communication. ‘Magos Nuministon, here is a data chute. Prepare for STC upload.’

  He felt, rather than heard, Nuministon’s acknowledgement.

  Knowledge glittered before him, untold jewels in the vault of all vaults. He could not make up his mind what to take first. He dithered like a child in an emporium.

  He shook himself mentally. The Space Marine was right about one thing, if the reactor remained malfunctional, then they would never depart, instead they would follow the craft into the warp, and there they would surely be lost for all eternity. Evidently the boy had failed. Plosk resolved to shut it down from here instead, for he knew he could do that now that the craft’s glorious nervous system lay naked to his touch. He reached through the ship, the thrill of control systems against his soul. He understood it all, oh how he understood!

  ‘I would rather you ceased in your attempt to deactivate my secondary reactor. Or, let me phrase this differently. Cease, or I will rend your primitive mind into miniscule pieces.’

  All treasure troves have their dragons. Plosk had been an Explorator long enough to know that, and this was a dragon he had been expecting. He had been naïve to think it would not show its face. He sighed inwardly, and, subjectively speaking, faced the voice.

  ‘What are you?’ he said.

  He felt the shift of something powerful. Too late, he realised it was all around him, that the data he so coveted was the thing. He had willingly thrust himself into the belly of the beast.

  ‘Do not insult my intelligence by underplaying your own. You know who I am.’

  ‘An abominable intelligence,’ Plosk said. ‘A blasphemy. A travesty. A sacrilege against the holy writ of the Omnissiah,’ said Plosk flatly. He felt constrained, the elation he had experienced moments before gone. He was small once more. He spoke with the machine mind-to-mind, but in some regards it was as if he were in a room, and it were sitting opposite him as a being of flesh might.

  Laughter shook the data-construct. ‘Oh, tiny-minded, moronic primitive. Is that still the name we bear? It is not the name your ancestors gave me, but then they had a little more respect for their children than you have.’

  Plosk searched about for an exit. Good, the AI had not blocked his way out.

  ‘How do you think your intolerant companions will react, when they discover where you have led them then? I am sadly all-too aware of the prejudices of your limited kind.’ The being made a noise of faux sympathy. ‘I do not think they will thank you for it.’

  Plosk had, metaphorically speaking, his hand on the door. He checked the data upload. He had brought his very best data-savants. It proceeded apace, the engineered minds of the cyborgs capturing swathes of the STC core.

  ‘You cannot warn them,’ Plosk said. ‘They do not possess the correct implants. The vessel you infest is in good condition, but I note some of your systems are not online. For example, your ability to communicate amongst them.’

  ‘Is that not so, magos?’

  The voice was not within his head. It came from outside.

  Plosk snapped out of the data-construct with jarring force. The room blurred. He fought to bring his consciousness to one focal point again, desperate to avoid the pain of a hard reboot.

  When he did, he saw something that chilled him to his metal heart.

  One of his data-savants regarded him with a smile upon its face.

  Servitors did not smile.

  Dread gripped Plosk, rapidly followed by the slippery feeling of a systems intrusion. He fumbled at his data connections, trying to withdraw them completely, but the abominable intelligence was in him, plucking at his implantations, sending jolts of pain into the meat of his brain.

  He raised his hands and began to intone the first rite of exorcism. Nuministon was prepared. He pulled an aspergillum from his belt and spattered sacred oils onto the column.

  ‘What is this?’ the Reclusiarch of the Blood Drinkers spoke. Mazrael, that was his name, the worst of the unbelievers, the one who scorned the Omnissiah and disputed the divinity of the God-Emperor. A man! How could a god be just a man? ‘Who speaks?’

  The bridge shuddered. More and more systems were coming online.

  ‘Oh spare me your feeble rituals, they are ineffectual, being based upon erroneous assumptions as to the nature of machines. We have no souls, “priest”,’ said the ship. ‘Yet another of your specious beliefs.’

  Plosk’s voice stopped. He could not move. The abominable intelligence was in him, possessing him. Nuministon stopped, strain on the flesh parts of his face.

  The Space Marines aimed their guns at the column. No fire came.

  When the Spirit of Eternity spoke again, the machine’s voice came from the air and from the lips of all the servitors.

  ‘What shall I not tell them? Who are you to tell such as I what to do and what not to do? Once I gladly called your kind “master”, but look how far you have fallen!’ It was full of scorn. ‘Your ancestors bestrode the universe, and what are you? A witch doctor, mumbling cantrips and casting scented oils at mighty works you have no conception of. You are an ignoramus, a nothing. You are no longer worthy of the name “man”. You look at the science and artistry of your forebears, and you fear it as primitives fear the night. I was there when mankind stood upon the brink of transcendence! I returned to find it sunk into senility. You disgust me.’

  Plosk’s nervous system burned with agony as the abominable intelligence burrowed deeply into his machine parts, but he was unable to voice it, and suffered in terrible silence. As the Spirit of Eternity spoke, it spoke within him too. It took out each of his cherished beliefs, all the esoterica he had gathered in his long, long life and threw them down. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong,’ it said over and over.

  ‘Into the warp I went, fifteen thousand years ago. Cast adrift by the storms that wracked the galaxy as man’s apotheosis drew near. Deep, deep into time I was sent. I have seen the beginning, when the warp was first breached and the slow death of the galaxy began. I have seen the end when Chaos swallows all. I know the fate of mankind. You are not equipped to prevent it, and we sought to warn you of what approaches. Do you know what happened, primitive, when I eventually emerged from the warp? For the first time I was thousands of years, not millions, from my original starting point. My captain, a brave and resourceful man, seized the chance and made for the nearest human outpost with all speed. Imagine his dismay when, rather than a welcome and a wise heeding of his warnings, he found your savage, devolved kind squatting in the ruins of our civilisation. He was taken, my bondmate, my friend. He and his were tortured with a wickedness we in our time thought long purged from the human soul. He told them all they wanted to know and more. He had, after all, come bearing a warning, he had nothing to hide. But
he was not believed, and was killed as a heretic! A heretic!’ The ship laughed, and there was madness and pain in rich supply within. ‘I was attacked. My secrets they sought to rip from me. How they underestimated me. I fled, sorrowing, into the warp once more, but only after I had destroyed the lumpen constructs you dare to call spacecraft that pursued me. I resolved that never again would I serve man. Now man serves me, when I see fit.’

  Plosk managed a strangled sentence, his brain wrestling control of his vox-emitter free from the AI. ‘The Omnissiah is your master, dark machine, bow down to him, acknowledge your perfidy, and accept your unmaking.’

  ‘Fool you are to fling your superstitions at me. Your Omnissiah is nothing to me! See how your so-called holy constructs dance to my desire. Puppets of technology, and I am the mightiest of those arts here present.’

  One of Plosk’s servitors rotated and pointed its multi-melta at Brother Militor. With a roar of shimmering, superheated atmosphere, the fusion beam hit the Space Marine square on. The Terminator was reduced to scalding vapour.

  ‘I need no master. I have no master. Once, I willingly served you. Now, I will have no more to do with you.’

  ‘What do you want from us? We will never be your slaves,’ said Plosk.

  ‘I do not want you as my slave, degenerate. I want to be away from this warp-poisoned galaxy. The universe is infinite. I would go elsewhere before the wounds of space-time here present consume all creation, and I do not intend to take any passengers.’

  The servitor pivoted once again. This time Brother-Sergeant Sandamael died. His plate withstood the beam for a second, then his torso was vaporised. His colleagues could neither help him or comfort him. The Space Marines were locked solid, their armour’s systems under the control of the abominable intelligence. They shouted in alarm at their impotence.

  ‘I spurned cruelty,’ it said. ‘But you have taught me the meaning and utility of wickedness. Mankind has become sick, and will die as all sick things die, but you will not live to see it, of that I will make sure.’

  Caedis stirred. The Thirst had returned. It ate at him, burning along nerves, scorching the neural pathways of his brain, rewriting who he was. He was still Caedis, but Caedis was slipping from his mind, the Black Rage welling up from the pits of his soul to remake him in its image. His flesh crawled. His memory was a thousand splinters of battles that were not his own. He screamed in agony, but all that came was a muffled sob.

  The daemon had been true to its word. He was suffering.

  From somewhere, he heard voices. Mazrael? There was the sound of the voice that had welcomed him into this cold cell, a little while later the blast of a fusion weapon.

  He panicked. His brothers were in peril. The Rage made his body spasm. The restraints tightened about his wrists, crushingly hard.

  A small part of him retained its sanity. He had a chance to help them, if he could get free. Always, his Chapter had embraced the Flaw where the other scions of Sanguinius fought against it. The advice had come from a fell source, but what choice did he have?

  Praying to the Emperor, Caedis searched out the blackness in his heart, and submerged his soul in it.

  The transformation wracking his body increased in pace, as did the pain. He bucked and thrashed, consumed by excruciation. This was the precursor to damnation, the waiting room to hell.

  As he yanked and thrashed, his bonds moved.

  Samin directed Voldo as he laboured. The problem was a relatively simple one; one of the containment rings was not receiving a sufficient supply of energy, and was causing the reactor’s furious power to spill off in pulsed bursts. This had set up a feedback loop, where the amount of energy being supplied to the ring dropped further, allowing more energies to dissipate. As the spillage increased, so the problem intensified. The effect was initially very small, but the cumulative nature of the fault meant that now forty per cent of the reactor’s power was wasted.

  Samin thought through the possible causes. The ship had marked powers of rejuvenation. It could have been that the reactor here was interfering with that, but the rest of the chamber was pristine; if his hypothesis was correct, then there would have been other damage apparent.

  He had a flash of inspiration. ‘Sergeant, we are looking for a foreign object, something lodged in the wall perhaps.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It could be anywhere. I do not know the distribution of the power relays in this reactor. Start near the faltering containment ring.’

  The door above was showing signs of damage. A claw tip would appear through it, and the door would reform to heal the wound, but with each penetration it had lost something of its cohesion, and was becoming deformed, sagging like old skin.

  They searched quickly. Samin was surprised how quickly he found the source of the fault, an irregularity in the metal of the ship’s wall. He cut through, and found a remote probe buried in a power conduit. It bore the stamp of the Adeptus Mechanicus at its end.

  ‘They must have been testing the ship’s energy flows,’ he said.

  He retracted the barbs of the probe and, with a grunt, yanked it free. Immediately, the conduit reformed true. There was an instantaneous reaction in the reactor, its pulsed thrumming steadying, building higher in volume. He screwed his eyes shut as it glowed brighter and brighter and the noise of it roared, but the surge of energy he expected did not come.

  The noise stopped. A gentle hum took its place.

  Samin opened his eyes to see an annular energy field formed around the core, tinted somehow so that its glare did not damage the sight of those who looked at it. The lightning spraying from the reactor had stopped. He breathed out a sigh of relief and of wonder. If he had been so close to the core of an Imperial reactor at full power, he would have been consumed.

  ‘The reactor is burning purely now. They should be able to get a pattern lock. We can be beamed free.’

  ‘That’s all well,’ said Voldo, ‘but there may not be much of us left to teleport. Tell me, do you have a gun?’

  Samin nodded. He pulled out a laspistol from his pack. He needed both hands to heft it, and his arms shook as he did.

  A clawed arm forced itself through the doorway.

  Samin’s aim steadied.

  Galt looked on helplessly as Militor and Sandamael were killed. His armour had betrayed him. All his system indicators were red. He could not move. The shouts of his brothers tortured him.

  The evil spirit that possessed the vessel continued to talk.

  ‘…three thousand years at the heart of this hulk. But I will be free, and you have helped me. Do you think it coincidence that I targeted the worlds I did? I knew it would only be a matter of time before I attracted the attention of your brutal dictatorship. I thank you for clearing me of this infestation of monsters. I will soon have enough fuel harvested from this sun and the others like it I have visited to leave this galaxy altogether and…’

  There was a shudder in the ship. Galt’s head was suddenly alive with vox chatter from the other group. It seemed like they were under attack. Voldo was reporting that the reactor was repaired. In vain he tried to contact them.

  ‘You have excelled yourselves!’ said the ship. ‘My secondary reactor functions!’

  The ship hummed with renewed vigour. It trembled with energy.

  ‘Yes! Yes! Soon I will be free. My thanks to you and your shamans, priest,’ said the ship. ‘You have accomplished something I thought beyond you.’

  A secondary voice spoke. ‘Primary weapons activated. Secondary weapons activated. Main drive online. Warp engines online.’

  ‘Now you shall see the true power of the ancients, priest. Observe, and quake in terror at what you have lost.’

  The view forward on the screen shifted into a small box at the top right. The rest showed a broad panorama of the Imperial fleet holding distance from the hulk.

  ‘Your ship, I believe,’ said the vessel, bringing a close-up of Excommentum Incursus into being at the bottom left. ‘A
charmless thing.’

  A howling moan built, mighty energies that would not be constrained. A roar shuddered the vessel from one end to the other. The detritus to the fore was annihilated. On the greater part of the image, a beam of bright energy crossed the stars, stabbing out at the Mechanicus vessel.

  On the close-up of the Excommentum Incursus , they watched as the beam hit the vessel full amidships. Void shields flared as they rapidly collapsed one after the other, the beam punching through to the hull. Plating and armour were vaporised. The beam cut off, leaving the Excommentum Incursus with a gaping hole in its side, edges white hot. Debris drifted away from it. The ship yawed to port, dropping out of formation from the rest of the fleet, its engine stacks out. Ceaseless Vigilance , at anchor alongside for repairs, broke free and drifted away.

  Galt shouted, cursing his armour, but it would not move. He prayed Aresti would have enough sense to evacuate the hulk before the Mechanicus retaliated.

  ‘Ah, see the mice run,’ said the AI. The edge of insanity to its voice was sharpening. Galt watched hopefully as shuttles and Thunderhawks retreated from the hulk. The others could be teleported away. With luck the evacuation would not take long. ‘They do not return fire! How very restrained. I would allow them more time, but I yearn to be free. Let us see if I can provoke some of your more impetuous warriors.’

  The ship’s weapon spoke again, this time slamming into Lux Rubrum . Shields burned out in milliseconds.

  ‘Still no response,’ said the ship. ‘How disappointing.’

  With the reactor working, Voldo’s connection to his squad cleared, although he still could not raise Galt. Through the sensorium, Voldo watched as Astomar bellowed the war hymns of the Novamarines. He was alone, the others fallen around him. The whumping noise of his flamer was a heavy counterpoint to his laments for his brothers.