The furrows started within a hairsbreadth of the arteries pulsing in the hollow of Tullio’s neck, and raked across the site of his primary heart, where the fused box of his rib cage had been exposed and shone whitely in parted meat. Past that, the ribs had been breached. The claws of the xenos were so sharp that they had cut cleanly through rather than breaking the bone.
Yansar peered into the wound. The source of the vitae was an internal bleed that would have finished a mortal human. A Space Marine’s blood was more easily staunched, but an arterial tear like that could still kill, given enough time, and the danger of embolisms caused by hyperclotted blood circulating round Tullio’s system could not be underestimated.
He had to cut away a section of Tullio’s rib box to get to the injury. He was quick. Through a gap an inch square, a world of engineered organs was revealed.
Tullio’s eyes flickered. He moaned. Yansar refrained from upping his sedation. He was nearly done.
Yansar’s narthecium extended a probe, which he inserted into the hole. As he did so he changed the setting on his lenses so that they projected a laser drawn view of Tullio’s innards onto his retina, the same way his helm could.
So much was packed into a Space Marine’s body cavity, organs of such refined design and function no evolutionary process could have created them. Yansar allowed himself to feel awed as he worked. Few beings got to see what he saw. Cawl might name himself creator of the Primaris Space Marines, but this was the Emperor’s work Yansar was witnessing.
The bleed was easily found, a tiny nick. Five bursts from the micro-las attached to the probe broke up the clots around it. A tiny grabber whipped out from the probe to clamp the tear shut while Yansar unfurled an adhesive web to close it. Once he allowed Tullio’s enhanced systems to operate freely, the wound would heal fully within a day.
Tullio was stirring. Yansar increased the tempo of the operation. He withdrew the probe, then replaced the section of removed bone and stapled it to hold still while he sealed it up with a bone welder he’d taken from a cabinet. That done, he pulled the skin back into place, sutured the cuts closed and sprayed them with healing balms. He gave his work one last look over. He was satisfied, and permitted himself a smile.
He turned to the machine and disengaged the pumps filling Tullio’s body with hormone suppressant. In a few moments, his Emperor’s gifts would engage and finish Yansar’s job for him.
There was a click, the soft, sharp noise of a safety catch being disengaged.
He turned back to Tullio. He had his bolt pistol in his hand. Slowly, he raised it to point at Yansar’s head.
‘Get down,’ said Tullio hoarsely.
Yansar dropped to the floor.
Tullio fired once. The report, ignition and explosion of the bolt blurred into one loud boom that reverberated around the small room.
Yansar looked around.
On the ground were the smoking remains of a mechanoid drone.
The Apothecary walked over and nudged it with his foot. Six metal legs curled around its broken mechanical thorax.
‘Xenos,’ he said. ‘Necron. It came through the vent.’ He looked up to where a grille had covered over an air circulation shaft. The centre had been neatly disintegrated.
‘Quiet,’ said Tullio. ‘Can you hear that?’
The sound of rustling came from outside the theatre door. Yansar drew his absolver pistol.
‘Help me up,’ said Tullio hoarsely.
‘Stay there, brother. Cover me from the cot. You will not regain your strength for an hour or more. Let your body heal.’
‘There’s not time, something’s coming.’
‘Stay down!’ Yansar went to the door and keyed it open, stopping it partway with a second press of the button.
The room on the other side was crawling with small, hexapedal robots. Flat green beams of light shone from their heads. Where they touched, matter frittered away into particles, which others of the swarm sucked up. The robots crawled over everything. A line of them entered and a line departed, carrying away their bounty as diligently as ants.
They did not appear to see Yansar, and he quickly shut the door.
‘More of them.’
‘Fetch me my bolt rifle,’ said Tullio, gesturing weakly to the stand the gun rested on. Yansar strode across the room, picked it up and handed it to Tullio. The veteran checked it over, and racked a bolt into the firing chamber.
‘If they attack, grenades will be of more use,’ said Yansar. ‘There are many of them.’
‘What about my armour? It will be hard to fight like this.’
‘It needs repair,’ said Yansar. ‘We’re going to need help to get out of here.’ He activated the vox. ‘Tetrarch, this is Yansar, respond,’ he voxed.
A menacing static hiss filled his hearing.
‘Tetrarch, we have a problem.’
‘No contact?’
Yansar held up a hand.
‘Apothecary!’ Tullio aimed at the door.
Dozens of spots of green light began to shine through the metal of the theatre door.
‘Perhaps you’d better get up after all,’ said Yansar, going to help Tullio to his feet.
The vox whined.
‘Tetrarch?’
The sound of boltgun fire came with a distorted voice.
‘This is Thracian.’
‘We are under attack. We are trapped in theatre four of the apothecarion.’
‘Then we are coming to you.’
The door was frittering away to nothing, craters growing around the dots of light.
‘Hurry,’ said Yansar.
‘Forgemaster, something approaches.’ Esau datacast readings from his suit sensorium to Sebastion. A swarm of red dots crawled down towards their position on his cartograph. ‘The location and manner of enemy is uncertain,’ said Esau.
‘Whatever they are, they are on the exterior of strategic command,’ said Sebastion calmly. ‘Stand ready. I am nearly finished. The xenos machine infection is too widespread for me to regain control. All organic servitor components of the fortress network are gone, but the invading xenos network has replaced them. I have to rig the primary cogitation junction for detonation to prevent the mountain regaining control, then destroy the weapons themselves.’ He looked upwards. The multiple arms of his servo harness continued to work around him. ‘See to it I complete the task. If we leave these weapons active, I predict all will return to functionality and be suborned by the mountain. The fleet is in danger. Destruction of this nexus must be achieved.’
‘As you command, Forgemaster,’ said Esau.
Filaments of living metal lay shrivelled all around the main cogitation array. He had freed it, for now, but the speed with which the strands stirred and began to reconstruct themselves suggested they would not remain sundered for long. Having removed all linkages from the surface, Sebastion found more beneath. He burned back what he could.
Esau’s cartolith pulsed with movement.
‘They are gathering above us. Concentration here.’ He sent the location to Sebastion and raised his storm bolter to aim at the ceiling. ‘Increasing energy emissions. They are coming through.’
Esau’s power fist crackled into life, sending dancing blue light around the room that brought false life to the dead.
Sebastion unclamped a melta flask from his thigh. He depressed a panel in the side, exposing the input jack for a remote detonator. He attached this with his human hands while the arms of the servoharness darted and cut, driving back tendrils of the silver metal reinvading the systems. With the detonator in place, he twisted the handle on the top of the bomb to arm it, then placed it within the machine.
‘Forgemaster,’ Esau said calmly. ‘I see them.’
A portion of the ceiling glowed green. A faint square, brighter to the centre, where a growing black dot spread ou
twards.
Sebastion glanced up at the breach. ‘Gauss beams. I hypothesise first wave canoptek organisms. We have awoken the guardians of the mountain, my brother.’
Metal and rockcrete was being broken down into black, grainy particulate that pattered down from the ceiling like the sands in an hourglass.
‘We will never be able to reoccupy this site,’ said Esau. The brighter green spread to the very edges of the square. The blackness within it followed, compressing the green tighter and brighter; though both green and black were circular, neither exceeded the limits of the square. More disrupted matter fell.
‘Initiating control implosion in main batteries.’ Sebastion’s many hands danced over the dusty console. The first of four cylinders rose from beneath a screen.
A tocsin honked, followed by a machine voice.
A small red cap flipped open on top of the first cylinder, revealing a dataport. ‘Priming first defence laser denial device. Execute.’ Sebastion’s data shunt stabbed down into the lock, twisted, and depressed the cylinder. Code readers chimed acknowledgement. A brief tremor shook the room as the gun blew.
The second cylinder rose upwards and exposed its dataport.
‘Now this is the one that caused the trouble in the first place. The active cannon that fired upon the tetrarch,’ Sebastion said.
Again his data interface slammed down. A second clarion of chimes. Another explosive rumble.
The third cylinder was rising when Esau spoke.
‘They are coming through.’
The square turned into a perfect shaft burrowed through dozens of feet of layered armour. Something moved back at the top, the green light cast by its mechanisms shifting over the floor.
A flood of robotic drones dropped through.
Esau opened fire. He paced his shooting. Storm bolters were destructive, but ate ammunition greedily.
‘Hurry,’ he said.
He couldn’t kill them all. Many of the insectoid robots exploded but more crashed onto the floor, where they drew themselves up into a living carpet of silver. They poured in all directions, covering the floor with their undulations. A thousand green ocular sensors shone. They swarmed Esau’s legs, and he stamped them flat. Where they clambered up his legs he plucked them free from his body and crushed them in his power fist. They exploded with mighty bangs. Mandibles twitched over his plating, playing spreads of deadly light. Ceramite and plasteel dissolved into nothing. Exposed systems sparked with short circuits before they too were dissolved. Still he continued firing.
Sebastion hurried. The living metal of the mountain was growing back quickly, accelerated by the presence of the drones. The upper limbs of his servoharness darted into the cogitation junction, cutting and burning. The lower pair reversed themselves, switched out their utility heads for short range plasma casters, and opened fire.
‘Now the lesser batteries,’ Sebastion said. Eight more cylinders. Two went down, the charges they were connected to detonating deep within the fortress-monastery and ripping out huge tranches of the control systems. Esau gave out a moan of pain.
He was being overwhelmed. Silver covered him head to toe, lit by flashes of gauss light. His storm bolter blasted a hole in the swarm, then vanished.
Esau’s flailing shape stood a moment longer, then collapsed in on itself. The swarm spread and flooded over the floor towards Sebastion. More of the drones were coming through the hole in the wall bored through by the traitors, during the fall of the fortress.
Sebastion left the last six cylinders, took up his bolter and turned to face his doom.
‘Severing your master’s link was a reckless cut, but it is done. Our guns will never be yours.’ He opened fire.
They came at him in a wave. He emptied his magazine into them and blasted their front rank apart. His servo arms whirled about, slaying hundreds with the energies of captive stars.
There were too many.
‘Detonate,’ Sebastion commanded.
The melta charge in the cogitation junction responded. Fusion glow backlit the Forgemaster as he fought, then fire ripped through the strategium, driving the dark back into the Pharos.
Chapter Fifteen
In the service of mankind
Circa 10,000 years ago
There was a problem. There always was a problem.
Cawl lay back in his chair. Its mechanisms cradled him more effectively than his own dear mother had centuries ago. Plush upholstery soothed his bare skin where he brushed it. Firm springs supported him. The air purification unit purred soothingly. But it was situated directly over his desk, it was always set too cold, and that spoiled everything.
He couldn’t think in his office. He couldn’t think out on the experimental line. It was too noisy, or too cold, or annoying in any one of a hundred different ways. He needed a little time to puzzle out the latest problem, but no one would give it to him.
A notification clarion played softly. Before he could respond the door opened, letting the soft noises of the experimental centre into his haven. Even that was too much to bear, and he groaned.
‘Not feeling it today, Director Sedayne?’
A long, thin-fingered hand fell away from Cawl’s eyes. A headache pulsed behind them. Jespin Creuz smiled at him winningly.
‘No. Do you have to gurn like that?’
Cawl sat forwards. A small, pre-Dark Age device sat on the glass of his desk. He picked it up and began to fiddle with it.
‘I am sorry my good humour offends you,’ Creuz said good-humouredly. He was holding an active data-slate against his chest. Cawl could only see the back of it, but the lights from the screen shone colours from Creuz’s white smock coat, and caught on the metal of the pens arrayed neatly in his pocket.
‘What do you want? Are those targets you have there?’ said Cawl.
‘They are.’
Creuz slid the slate across the desk.
Cawl glanced at the screen and grunted.
‘You are behind,’ said Creuz. ‘Significantly behind.’
‘I am old, that is what I am, Creuz. Three centuries weigh a man down. I need a rest.’
‘There can be no rest.’ Creuz gave Cawl a look of mock sympathy. His eyes were too small for his big bald skull, and they were lost in his sockets, which were smudged around with purple and black. ‘I wouldn’t bring up questions of age with Him, if I were you. He’s older than all of us, so they say.’
‘Well, He doesn’t look it, and He doesn’t look like He feels it,’ Cawl said. He put the ancient device down on the desktop, and gestured at it with an open hand. ‘This device was made by men with a far greater grasp of science than we have. Not one person I have met can decide exactly what it was created for. Yet if you look at it, it is simple. A spring loaded arm, no spring now, but that’s what it was. A proto-plastek disc to take something, perhaps a larger disc. This groove here,’ he ran his finger around it, ‘I think it took a protective material. Some kind of felt, maybe. And this.’ He picked it up and flipped it over. ‘This took a motor, I am sure. Perhaps this hole here took a lens of some kind.’
‘A data recording device?’
Cawl pointed at Creuz. ‘A lot of people say that. None of them can explain why they think so, or how it worked.’
Creuz shrugged. ‘Maybe He knows.’
‘He probably does. He probably saw the damn thing when it was working.’ Cawl looked into the reflection in the glass tabletop. A face that was not his own looked back. It had a high forehead over a face that was tall overall, a downturned mouth, a long, thin nose that would have been aquiline if it didn’t change its mind at the tip and turn upwards. Long hair, obviously dyed black, lay fl
at over his technologist’s robes. It was the countenance of a vain man who was not blessed with the genes to justify vanity. ‘He won’t say though, will He? He keeps His secrets close. We wallow about in the darkness of ignorance, He knows so much, but will He share? No.’
‘You sound disillusioned.’
‘I’m tired.’
Creuz retrieved his slate and gave Cawl a stern look. ‘It doesn’t matter if you are tired. You have a task. You were chosen by Him. He thinks you can do it, He expects you to.’
‘And I will!’ snapped Cawl. ‘I need more time. There are problems with the protein sequencing. The coding provided by the genarchs of Cambon is incorrect. I have had to go through the whole spool and reset it multiple times. It is not I who is at fault.’
‘Then work quicker.’
‘How many test subjects do you want me to kill?’ said Cawl. ‘I have run through four batches of volunteers, and innumerable vat blanks. The carapace is stable until implantation. The same problem, every time, only the cause of death changes.’
‘This time?’
‘The last batch spread uncontrollably and hardened prematurely,’ said Cawl, waving his hands irritably.
‘Six months ago it was disintegrating.’
‘Well, they still all die, Creuz.’
‘Amar Astarte will come down here next herself, you know, it won’t be me.’
‘I’m sick of that name,’ growled Cawl. ‘Tell her I have to go back to the baseline coding again. There are more faults in there. I will find them, but I need more time!’
Creuz bent lower. ‘Well that you don’t have, Director Sedayne,’ he said. ‘Work faster, or the Emperor will replace you. I’m warning you. I’ve seen it happen.’
‘You mean she’ll replace me.’
‘You are serving mankind, not Him, and certainly not her,’ Creuz scolded him.
‘Then I will redouble my efforts, in the service of mankind,’ said Cawl sourly.
‘See that you do.’ He looked around. ‘Nice office. It would be a shame to lose it.’
Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Page 19