He tried to think past the rage. The tactical situation had changed. He couldn’t be sure that Wienand had instigated the attack but even if she hadn’t, she had friends who dared act on her behalf. Who were they? Too many possibilities. His own position now looked more precarious. He reconsidered the deployment of his forces.
Vangorich let three hours go by before he ventured onto Proscription Way. He found Ferren Reach in a book-lined cell on the fourth floor. The sniper had put his rifle away and resumed his scholar’s habit. Reach was the same age as Krule, but looked much older, even older than Vangorich. His face was a map of wrinkles deep as canyons. His hair and beard were lank, grey, and long. His stoop and his shuffle were convincing, but they were false. The body beneath the robes was supple wire, capable of remaining motionless yet alert for days. He squinted as if through cataracts.
He didn’t break the act even before the Grand Master of the Officio. He was standing by the shelves set into the wall to the left of the door when Vangorich walked in. He looked up from the manuscript he was holding. He didn’t look pleased. He nodded once, which was what passed for a salute from Reach.
‘So?’ Vangorich asked.
Reach looked back down at the book and turned the page over. ‘First time I’ve shot to miss,’ he said.
‘You made it convincing, I’m sure.’
‘He’s counting his blessings.’
‘Well done.’
‘Feels like a loss. Don’t like losses.’
Vangorich walked over to the Assassin. ‘It’s my hope that you killed an idea today.’ He gestured at the rows of leather spines. ‘That’s a target you can appreciate, I would think.’
Reach snorted and closed the book. ‘I wouldn’t.’ After a moment, conscious that he might be pushing too far, he added, ‘Grand Master.’
Vangorich spread his hands, expressing regret. ‘I’m sorry, Ferren. The dodge was necessary.’
‘Why keep him alive? If he’s worth attacking, he’s worth killing.’
‘He isn’t worth a war. The balance is delicate. If we killed him, we could trigger a civil war in the Inquisition, or if and when they realised what we’d done, that would be just as bad. The agents of that institution, with Wienand in the ascendant, are the only useful allies we have right now. The goal today was to destabilise Veritus. Make him uncertain about his position and his attackers.’
Reach replaced his book. ‘Well, job done, sir.’ Somewhat mollified, he added, ‘Think it helped?’
‘I hope so.’ Vangorich moved to the window and looked out. The traffic on Proscription Way flowed in both directions, untroubled by the earlier violence or by the unseen ork presence beyond the vault. This region of the Imperial Palace had been the least touched by the great panic. Instead of rioting, the inhabitants had withdrawn further into their hermetic studies. They poured their consciousness into the mysteries of faith, and denied the upheavals of the world. It was a nice strategy. Though not one, he thought, that the orks would respect, once they came.
And was the game he was playing against Veritus any more practical? He had to believe it was. He had to believe that Wienand was moving towards a viable strategy to combat the orks.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Reach said behind him, ‘but we’re putting a lot of faith into another party to solve the big problems.’
The irony made Vangorich grin. It was either that or curse. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘We have to have faith.’ Another hard lesson from the hard days.
Eight
Mars – the Noctis Labyrinth
Sklera Verreaux was the first to see a possibility in Eldon Urquidex. She observed the magos biologis alight from one of the Subservius’ shuttles. He was part of a group of Mechanicus priests and monotask servitors. Draped in the shadows of her stealth suit, Verreaux watched the arrivals through a telescopic sight. Urquidex was speaking to the priest the Assassins had identified as Artisan Trajectorae Augus Van Auken. Urquidex was broader than his companion, to the point that he had a bodily presence unusual for the adepts of the Omnissiah. What caught her attention, though, was his manner of conversation. His right arm was up near his face, and his digitools extended and flexed to no visible purpose. Though the rest of his body had the same floating stillness typical of the Martian priests as he kept pace with Van Auken, the hand gesture looked a great deal like agitation.
When she passed on her observation to Clemetina Yendl, the Temple Vanus Assassin said, ‘A magos who is upset could be very useful to us. We should cultivate his acquaintance.’
So Yendl did.
It wasn’t difficult. Beneath her disguise of false augmentatia, she moved through the low-security zones of Mars easily enough. Urquidex was involved, as soon as he arrived, with the excavations beneath the Noctis Labyrinth, one of the veils Yendl’s team needed to pierce. Yendl spoke to Urquidex for the first time when he put in an appearance outside the Labyrinth. She played a hunch. She introduced some flaws into her camouflage. Very small ones, visible only in close proximity. Just enough so only Urquidex would be able to catch them, but enough for him to realise she was not what she appeared to be. There was a risk. The team could afford her loss, she reasoned.
‘Why are you speaking to me?’ Urquidex asked.
‘Because I think you would like to speak to me.’
There was a pause. The right arm raised again, the digits twitching with indecision. ‘You are attempting to suborn me.’
‘From a path you know to be false,’ she said. ‘It is the Fabricator General who is approaching treason.’
‘I am alone with my doubts.’
‘But you are being true to the Tenth Universal Law.’
‘The soul is the conscience of sentience,’ he recited.
‘You are listening to your conscience. The Fabricator General is ready to abandon Terra. That is sentience without soul.’
One of the priest’s telescopic eyes extended to examine Yendl, as if a study of her mask could reveal truths. ‘How much do you know?’
‘What the Fabricator General intends. Not what he can do.’
Urquidex’s eye withdrew. There were clicks and electronic chirps as if the collective of components that his body had become were in debate with each other. He said, ‘There is something that should be known.’
He incorporated Yendl into his complement of electro-priests and enginseers when he returned to the Noctis Labyrinth. The complex was an inverted hive city of laboratoria. The experimental centres functioned like the cells of an organism, at times working in isolation, at others linking with many in the service of larger projects. Urquidex’s party descended through levels of catwalks and tunnels into a world pulsing with arcane energy and technological ferment. Yendl could not understand the import of most of what she saw. It was too fragmentary. Through doorways, she saw vast machines engaged in dances complex, massive and strange. The scale of the endeavours was too huge for any one consciousness to encompass, and she came to a greater understanding of why the worship of the Machine-God had such a hold on Mars. What was constructed here, what was brought to mechanical life, and what was unleashed were far beyond the human. The spark of the numinous crackled in the giant forges.
Though Yendl couldn’t guess at the function of each piece of the puzzle that she witnessed, she had a sense of all the cells working in concert. A single project, perhaps the greatest undertaken, united the laboratoria. The cells were the mind of Mars, and it had but one goal.
Hundreds of levels down, at the end of a tunnel that twisted and spiralled and sprouted branches like ganglia, they reached the most gigantic nerve centre. It was bowl-shaped. Concentric circles of workstations and control thrones encircled a fifty-metre column of pict screens. Thousands of adepts were at work, mechadendrites plugging them into thrones and, Yendl guessed, to each other. The air was filled with the screech of binary cant.
Urquidex led his retinue
to a post two-thirds of the way down the bowl. He settled into the throne, mechadendrites rising from it to sink into the base of his skull. Before him was a control surface stretching several metres in both directions. There were more ports and mechadendrites here too, enough for about half of Urquidex’s subordinates. The rest turned to devices that Yendl knew were mechanisms of some kind, though so foreign to the ways of flesh with their clusters of rods and dials and energy discharges that to her eyes they resembled jointed metal sculpture more than any form of instrumentality.
‘Bear witness to the Grand Experiment,’ Urquidex told her.
She stood beside the throne. There were other attendants, up and down the bowl, who stood guardian beside their magi, on hand to assist but not assigned particular duties. Yendl adopted that role. She slowed her breathing. She achieved machinic inertness. She watched the screens on the column.They showed feeds from numerous locations. She studied them, but could glean nothing from them. They were fragments, glimpses of vast and powerful mechanisms. Other screens showed very little. In the corners of one frame Yendl recognised the dry docks of the Ring of Iron, but the imagers were centred on empty space. The remaining screens, easily a third of the total, showed Phobos. The image of the moon repeated at intervals along the height of the column, rendering it clearly visible to every tier.
For the best part of an hour, all that happened was a gradual increase in activity. The movements of the adepts became more frequent and faster, as if greater numbers of variables were demanding attention. The chitter and scrape of binary intensified. Yendl didn’t move. She did as Urquidex had instructed. She waited to bear witness.
The event began. The energy in the laboratorium spiked. The machinery in some of the pict screens began to glow and spit arcs of lightning. The air vibrated with a subaudible hum. Yendl had the sense of being in a cathedral as a service moved towards its climax. Machinic prayer rose in a stuttering crescendo. Readouts climbed into red.
Then the vibration was not just in the air. It was in control surfaces, in the bodies of the adepts, in the floor, in the planet itself.
Phobos vanished.
The pict screens that looked at nothing flared. The image dissolved into static, returned, broke up, settled into a pulsing, jerking, tenuous existence. Tocsins sounded. More gauges red-shifted. In the centre of the frame, where there had been nothing, now there was Phobos, surrounded by a violet, violent corona.
A few seconds later, the ground shook. The earthquake lasted a few seconds. Its magnitude dropped off quickly until there was just the vibration again. Then that too stopped. The priests of Mars ceased all movement. It seemed to Yendl that they slumped with exhaustion, though there was no discernible change in their posture.
Urquidex said nothing to her then, nor during the four hours that followed as damage to the planet and machinery was assessed. Yendl remained as she was, processing what she had seen, assessing courses of action.
The Mechanicus had teleported Phobos. She deduced that the test had moved the moon from one side of Mars to the other. The game with gravitational forces struck her as reckless. The fact that the Fabricator General had ordered such a step taken implied that the risk was less than the alternative.
And the test had been successful, but Phobos was barely more than twenty-two kilometres in diameter. That was a long way from being Mars itself, and the distance it had travelled was slight. If Kubik intended to remove Mars from the orks’ reach, he would have to be planning a jump hundreds of light years long, at the very least. Yendl would have liked to take comfort in that thought. She didn’t dare.
After another six hours, Urquidex disengaged himself from the throne. Yendl, with the others in the retinue, followed him back up the sides of the laboratorium bowl. A few rows from the top, Urquidex turned down a row. Van Auken was waiting for him.
‘Very satisfactory,’ the artisan trajectorae said. ‘Your conclusions?’
‘There was a seventy-eight per cent survival rate for the sensors placed on the surface of Phobos. The same result for those in subterranean locations.’
‘That too is satisfactory.’
‘If these proportions hold for Mars itself, the twenty-two per cent loss will be reflected by over a billion deaths.’
‘A regrettable but sustainable level of attrition. The Fabricator General’s projections allowed for considerably more.’
‘I can only speak for my domain–’ Urquidex began.
Van Auken cut him off. ‘Yet you propose to do otherwise.’ The grating electronic voice had no inflection. There was no flesh visible beneath the tall priest’s robes. His prosthetics long and multi-jointed, there was very little about him that resembled the human. Yet his puzzlement was clear. ‘I hope you are not still intent on questioning the path the Fabricator General has mapped out. You will lead one to conclude you are suffering from apostatical delusions.’
‘Merely a question of means. The arrival of the orks in the Sol System has created a new urgency, is that not so?’
‘That is correct, on a number of fronts. The Imperial Senatorum is demanding the deployment of Titans.’
‘Fabricator General Kubik has refused?’
‘Of course he has. What sense would there be in departing the system while leaving behind major assets? Furthermore, they would be thrown away in the current tactic adopted by Terra.’
‘How has the Fabricator General answered the demands?’
‘By presenting practical obstacles. Explaining that the time and the means to transport the great weapons are lacking.’
Yendl realised that Urquidex was conducting the conversation for her benefit. She was amassing all the evidence Vangorich would need to prove Kubik’s malfeasance. She worried about what courses of action might still be open.
Urquidex said, ‘Is that wise? Moving Phobos to a different position on its orbit is far from what will be required. Will we not need more time than we are likely to have at our disposal?’
‘You are indeed mistaken to speculate outside your realm of expertise, magos biologis, and mistaken again in your assumption. The principles behind the teleportation technology have been confirmed. The Grand Experiment is a success. The work that remains is a matter of adjusting scale. A simple question of brute force.’
‘I see.’ Urquidex said nothing else, but did not take his leave.
Van Auken’s lenses whirred, adjusting focus as he studied Urquidex. ‘Your hesitation implies a lack of purpose or a state of confusion,’ he said. ‘You are creating the necessity of a further incident report.’
‘The completion of this project will be regarded as nothing less than treason by the rest of the Imperium.’
‘We act, as ever, in accordance with fealty to the Machine-God. Or are you saying that the preservation of Mars is unimportant?’
‘Of course not.’
‘The Imperium is more than Terra. We have already learned much from the rapid technological development of the Veridi giganticus. It is a significant probability that the benefits of what may yet be learned will offset losses incurred in the process. Study of the Veridi is more important than their neutralisation, especially if they are on the point of cladogenesis.’ More adjustment of lenses. Yendl imagined Urquidex seen under extreme magnification. She wondered what psychological cues, imperceptible to the organic eye, Van Auken might be observing on his fellow magos. ‘Or don’t you agree?’ Van Auken asked.
‘I do not.’
‘You are challenging the edicts of the Fabricator General?’
Yendl was sure she heard surprise in Van Auken’s electronic tones.
‘I disagree with their premises and their conclusions. But I will not disobey them.’
‘You are risking much, magos biologis.’
‘So is Fabricator General Kubik,’ Urquidex said. ‘It is the nature of the times.’
The conversation t
urned into an exchange of cant. As inhuman as the sounds were, as still as the two priests were, Yendl read an intensification of the conflict. Then Urquidex turned away, and started back up the ramp leading out of the bowl.
Urquidex said nothing on the journey back out of the Labyrinth. They emerged from a gate whose massive, sigil-inscribed iron doors parted just long enough to let them through and sealed with a metallic boom behind them. Urquidex chattered in cant to his retinue and his subordinates scattered on their appointed tasks, leaving Yendl.
‘Have you understood?’ he asked.
They kept their voices low, though that meant little in a society where augmetic hearing was the norm. Van Auken had accused Urquidex of taking risks. You have no idea how big they are, Yendl thought. She saw the delineations of heroism in Urquidex’s quiet actions. ‘I understand very well,’ she said. ‘Does the Fabricator General know how to stop the orks?’
‘My data on that point is inconclusive.’
‘But if he does, he has no interest in doing so.’
‘Our knowledge base is growing exponentially. The Veridi are therefore an opportunity, not a disaster.’
Yendl suppressed a curse. ‘The teleportation project must be halted,’ she said.
‘That is impossible, unless you have the means of an invasion at your disposal. Nor will I raise my hand in disobedience.’
‘Then why show me all this?’
‘So you can take the action necessary.’
‘You just said the project can’t be stopped.’
‘It can be slowed.’
Yendl nodded. A delay would help. If it were long enough, Kubik might lose his window of opportunity. Circumstances and Vangorich might be able to intervene and force the Mechanicus to fulfil its duties to the Imperium. The hope was weak, and based on shifting ground, but it was Yendl’s responsibility to grasp it. Shifting ground was both the terrain and the goal of the Assassin.
‘If moving Mars is a question of power,’ she reasoned, ‘then an attack on the Grand Experiment’s energy plant might result in a serious setback.’
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