by Thorpe, Gav
The spindle-wrangler glanced down at their victim. He was caked in blood and garbed in the robe of a tributai clerical worker – one of the log keepers, perhaps. He rolled to his back with a groan, revealing a face swollen about the eyes and mouth, his cool beige complexion looking jaundiced in the poor light. She didn’t recognise him.
Ghelsa hefted the stranger up onto her shoulder, thrusting the multi-tool threateningly at the others.
‘Leave it be. Tell Gevren the deed is done and no more need be said.’
The hyperezia did not look convinced, but they made no further effort to molest her as she backtracked towards the clanking chain of the ascender shaft.
With a quiet groan, the man roused as she lowered him, holding his body close to hers while she waited for the next platform to come around. He peered at her through the slit of a bloodshot grey eye, child-like against her mass.
‘Danger,’ he croaked.
‘No, you’re safe now,’ she assured him, moving her arm protectively around his shoulder as she darted a glare at the guards, who were tending to their own injured. ‘Well, relatively safe.’
‘All of us,’ whispered the man. ‘Hereteks.’
The platform rattled past and Ghelsa missed it, distracted by this statement.
‘The princeps is a traitor,’ the man continued wheezily, every word a clear effort through the pain. Whoever he was, Ghelsa admired the sheer will it must have taken for him to remain conscious. ‘Will doom… us all.’
‘Says who?’ Ghelsa was startled, but she had enough presence of mind to drag her companion into the lift when the next platform appeared.
The man said something else, but it was lost in the noise of the conveyance.
‘What was that?’ Ghelsa said, raising her voice. He pushed closer and she bent an ear towards his bloodied lips.
‘I… I am an inquisitor.’
CHAPTER 2
AZ KHALAK
Volleys of phosphor blasts lashed through the probing column of hereteks, reinforced by a thunderous barrage of heavier weapons fire. Their armour no match for the weapons arrayed against them in the carefully prepared ambush, the sixty-strong enemy force was halved in the opening seconds. White-coated skitarii used side streets to sweep around the back of their foes, swiftly surrounding them while kastelan constructs burst through broken walls, their phosphor blasters lighting the rubble-choked outskirts of Az Khalak.
Everything moved as Exasas willed it, each manoeuvre carefully controlled and timed for maximum kill-efficiency. Skitarii squads fell back and countered as easily as he extended or retracted a mechanical digit. Robot maniples were his fist, brutal but powerful, breaking all that they touched.
The beset rebel combatants tried to break free, massing a frontal assault to push on towards the open wildlands that surrounded Az Khalak. Exasas had foreseen that gambit and had prepared his defensive protocols accordingly. Two squads of his skitarii withdrew through the remnants of a storage house, emerging with several seconds to spare until they met the breakthrough with a precise, devastating fusillade.
And then the flourish that had taken several subjective years of study and calculation to formulate. The Exasas Corollary to Liberik’s Fourth Theorem: given sufficient pressure, an adequately armed opposition will naturally seek not the weakest point of an attack, but the weakest point within closely bounded timing markers. If exploited it meant a 0.43 per cent increase in kill-efficiency/temporal commitment.
[alert]
The transmission was one of seven that crowded into Exasas’ noospheric awareness, joining many others in his memory queue for later assessment and formal archiving.
With reluctance, he halted the simulation, rededicating the portion of his processing metriculator that had been sub-adjourned to carry out the thought-exercise. The mathematical representations of the skitarii, their foes and the ruined outskirts froze mid-equation, the scene imprinted upon his digital senses in as much stark detail as if it had been a real event.
More so, since it had been his antarithms that had conducted the battle, playing the part of both aggressor and defender. Every triumph and loss had been Exasas’ to celebrate and suffer.
It certainly felt more solid than the destruction being wrought by the Casus Belli and the rest of the battle group. Exasas only experienced the carnage second hand, relying on the Titan’s processors and the servitor exchanges to gather some sense of the forces unleashed.
They had joined with the battle group as planned and entered the lowlands across the Asanaik River. Skitarii support platoons in reconnaissance transports had swept aside the enemy’s first-stage forces. The Titans had not even slowed to engage the lightly armoured and armed anti-grav skimmers.
The approaches to Az Khalak were a different matter. Several hundred enemy armoured vehicles and walkers were dug in across the hills along with considerable infantry support, for weeks an impenetrable barrier to the massed might of the Astra Militarum. Orbital defences within the fortress itself protected the siege lines from starship attack. Similarly potent anti-air guns prevented direct drop assault and anything but the most erratic high-altitude bombing and long-range shelling. In ferrocrete bunkers and kilometres of linking trenchworks and tunnels, the renegades were able to weather such attacks with relatively little concern. Consequently the defenders’ heaviest artillery was able to move close to the outer line with some impunity, extending the lethal zone around the citadel by several more kilometres.
The sheer scale of the endeavour had excited Exasas. Even though, as rebels, the enemy were equipped with standard Imperial equipment and materiel for the most part, which eliminated a large number of variables, the logistical calculations alone had required dedicated access to several logistaria slaved to the magos’ pattern-equations. He had recalibrated whole formulae to take into account the possible morale and discipline proclivities of a renegade faction.
While the magos had run thousands of scenario-specific data-threads in transit to the world, the Astra Militarum had employed the simpler but more costly approach of attacking with actual men and tanks. Repeatedly, despite mounting losses, in the assumption that their attritional rate was higher than that of the inhabitants.
They had been wrong.
The wreckage of previous armoured thrusts lined highways with burnt-out chassis and mounds of blackened corpses. The rockcrete roads themselves were little more than ribbons of cratered grey, their course plotted as much by the devastation written along their length as anything on a schematic chart.
Assaults cross-country had fared little better. Pounce-flachettes, sniper teams and las-traps awaited any pioneer corps that ventured forward to clear the heavier mines and self-propelled anti-tank guns. Tanks forging between the scattered copses of trees were soon targeted by the mobile artillery guns, each subsequent attack slowed and corralled by the metal corpses of its predecessors.
The Imperial Guard commanders reckoned casualties in the tens of thousands without hesitation, but the slaughter at Az Khalak had concerned even the logistaria corps attached to the Departmento Munitorum. It was not just an issue of manpower. New regiments could be raised without too much difficulty. Arming them proved a more difficult proposition, but many forge worlds had shifted full production to maintaining the arsenals of the Astra Militarum since the Great Rift had opened and war unlike anything seen in ten thousand years had engulfed the Imperium. To Exasas it was only a matter of scale and time. Given sufficient raw materials, the forge worlds could provide the war materiel for thousands of such forces across Imperial history – and had done so.
The real problem was starships, or the lack of them. The Imperial Navy was stretched to breaking, and every regiment lost on Nicomedua was another transport convoy that had to risk lengthy warp transit, each run to a recruiting world requiring armed escort lest it be lost even before it reached the battlezone.
Where such apocalypse had befallen the Imperial Navy and the Astra Militarum,
the Titans of the Legio Metalica ventured without fear. Seven dedicated barges of the Legion carried the military might of ten times that number of transports for lesser mortals and machines.
Gevren:
Though divorced from the noosphere when not at his station, Gevren was able to direct transmit to the magos via his MIU link. Exasas marvelled at the sophistication involved in digitally rendering and broadcasting just the exact tone of derision the moderatus prime desired.
Gevren:
Before Exasas could retort, the noosphere crackled with command code as the plasma annihilator fired. Three sequential blasts seared into the ravaged foothills, devastating a stretch of revetments and gunpits.
Haili:
Static danced with her thoughtwaves, the interference coming as her weapon cycled into its recharge phase and feedback data from the gunnery crew streamed directly into the moderatus’ thoughts.
Haili:
It was true – the Warhound Scout Titans that led the advance scoured trench and bunker with their turbo-lasers and mega-bolters. The twinned inferno cannons of Steel Wolf filled subterranean tunnels with cleansing promethium fire, sheets of blue flame erupting from concealed entry points and gunnery slits.
Behind came the Casus Belli and other Battle Titans. Reavers, Warhounds and Warriors laid down a constant barrage of shells, lasers and missiles, the devastation advancing across the scorched earth of the foothills like a bow wave before the massive war engines of the Cult Metalica. Quake cannons pierced metres-thick gates of outer towers while apocalypse warheads ripped craters from the earth, tossing men, machines and gravel high into the air. Gatling blasters, volcano cannons and plasma destructors made a ruin of the enemy that fled the attack, shredding, crushing and searing as the rebels abandoned their posts in their thousands and fleeing vehicles choked the broken roads.
Ignoring wordless protests and grunts of pain, Ghelsa hauled her companion off the liftchain just above the reactor decks. The ceiling was low, forcing her to proceed in a half-crouch, dragging the man across the smooth ferrocrete floor by the scruff of his robe. Level dekatriaz was a ’tweenspace, existing more for the necessity of the neighbouring systems than for any purpose of its own.
There were no lumens, but a faint luminescent lichen provided a little light to navigate between the thick columns holding up deck duadekaz above. The gurgle of cess drains and the hiss of the coolant loop told her when she was as far from any grating or other ingress as was possible.
The man flapped a hand at her, bruised and swollen from defending himself against the cudgels and kicks.
‘Thank… you.’
Ghelsa didn’t answer. She wasn’t at all sure whether she had just done something incredibly stupid or not. To distract herself, she fished inside her coverall and pulled out a slender flask of resynthesised alcohol. It was called ‘Machine-spirits’ by the more jocular members of the deck-crews, filtered out of the secondary fuel lines, diluted and flavoured to a variety of secret recipes from the various flora – and sometimes fauna – that eked an existence in the shadows of the downdecks.
She passed it to the man, who took a sip, coughed speckles of blood across her coveralls, and then took a longer swig. Ghelsa screwed on the cap and put the flask back into her pocket. She slipped out a wedge of drywater and pressed it between his lips. The inert chip of wood-like material activated with the merest contact of moisture to realign its molecules into a mouthful of water and vital salts. Intended for those on extended deep station in battle – with no access to the main water supplies – the drywater, like the Machine-spirits, had come her way via a more successful game of Omnissekh a few days earlier.
The stranger fumbled at his robe, checking the pockets in some agitation. He sat up, swayed for a moment as dizziness struck him, and then resumed his increasingly desperate search.
‘No, no, no,’ he muttered. He raised a hand to his head, wincing. ‘Damn it!’
‘What’s the matter?’ Ghelsa helped him sit up, one hand on his back.
‘My sigil. My Inquisitorial sigil. Gone. That serpent took it!’
‘How convenient,’ said Ghelsa.
‘What?’ He looked at her through the drying blood and bruises. ‘You think I would pretend to be an inquisitor?’
‘What seems more likely to you?’ Ghelsa sat back on her heels, the multi-tool still in her hand just in case. ‘That the moderatus prime of an Imperator-class Titan is a heretek and ordered the killing of one of the Emperor’s inquisitors, or that you’ve been caught impersonating one?’
The man’s shoulders slumped and he gazed down towards the hard floor.
‘I’ve failed. My pride… I should have known better.’
‘Let’s idle the gears a moment,’ said Ghelsa. ‘My name is Ghelsa vin Jaint, tributai second-class, specialising in mass mechanics. I tighten and loosen things. And occasionally hit them. I don’t know whose robes these are, but you definitely aren’t a tributai.’
‘You can call me Harkas. Ossissiru Harkas is the name by which I currently am known. I am, as I claim, a member of the Holy Orders of the Emperor’s Inquisition. And what I say is true. Your princeps intends to turn over the Casus Belli to the forces of the traitors.’
Ghelsa slowly absorbed this, not sure what to believe.
‘So how did you end up here?’
Wildfires raged through the foothills, the thick smoke obscuring more distant defences and the citadel itself. The smog was no obstruction to the noospheric-enhanced senses of the Casus Belli, whose targeting matrices could pinpoint a firing solution in pitch blackness up to the extent of a planet’s curvature.
The flare of white lasbeams, the startling blue hue of plasma and the flames of missile detonations lit the smoke. Grey-armoured vehicles swarmed like insects through the long grass.
Exasas registered all of the standard and non-standard visible spectrum data without any sense of connection. He found far more enlightenment from his metriculated decoding of the scene. Projectile velocities and impact forces clamoured for attention among the arc of temperature gradients, intersecting geometries of firing angles and the ever-present kill-efficiency calculations.
Improving – perfecting? – this last factor had become Exasas’ lifework. Even the one-sided slaughter playing out before her currently varied between a 98.8 per cent and 99.1 per cent efficiency. His complex calculations took into account the expenditure of energy and resources as well as received damage, and also a unique declining weighting based upon time expended.
The main battery boomed, causing the superstructure of the Imperator to shudder. Trajectory angles superimposed upon Exasas’ thoughts fed from the noospheric link of the moderatus prime. The explosion ripped away the top of a fortified hill, hundreds of tonnes of earth and ferrocrete turned to falling dust and grit littered with body parts.
Exasas flashed back to Gevren with a sub-packet of controlled amusement.
Exasas:
He transmitted targeting data for a few metres to the left of the impact point, where the reinforced structure of an ammunition store jutted intact from the debris. The magos sent scans from a recon overflight made two days earlier that highlighted the sensor returns indicating the existence of the chamber.
Exasas:
Gevren:
The moderatus’ use of the truncated form of address was particularly petty.
Gevren:
&
nbsp; It was hard to argue against that point, though Exasas’ equations contained a contingency formula to take into account periods of necessary dormancy.
Gevren:
The note of pity that accompanied the last statement irked Exasas more than the contempt that had started the exchange.
Exasas:
A flare of derision accompanied the next transmission.
Gevren [rebuke]:
Exasas:
Gevren:
Exasas: