by Thorpe, Gav
‘What can you see?’ she asked.
‘No unfaithful present in the antae,’ the alpha reported. ‘The doors to the czella are open.’
Ghelsa shuddered. There was nothing physical between her and the holiest part of the Casus Belli. She could – in theory – just walk in there and stand next to the princeps senioris. She trembled, her legs almost buckling at the thought.
Another followed – that the princeps and the moderati were also hereteks, if what Harkas had claimed was true. She had to go into the czella to stop them.
‘Come with me,’ she told the skitarii, walking towards the entrance.
The battle-form followed a few paces behind. She turned her attention to the robot maniple and thought she recognised a particular dent in the chestplate of one of the two constructs.
‘Are you Delta 6-Terror?’
‘Designate the moderati and princeps as unfaithful.’
‘I thought so.’ Ghelsa turned to the closest alpha. ‘What is the faith status of the moderatus prime?’
‘The moderatus prime is a faithful non-combatant, tributai-alpha,’ the warrior replied.
Ghelsa gritted her teeth in frustration, though she had been expecting that response.
‘And you have no means of contacting the dominus to recategorise the command crew as unfaithful?’
‘Connection to the dominus has ceased.’
‘I see.’ Ghelsa sighed, hefted the multi-tool and arc rifle and started once more towards the antae. ‘Follow me.’
The interior of the antae was marred by battle, the polished walls scorched by phosphor marks and gouges from macrostubber rounds. The servo-skulls clustered close to the ceiling like nervous children, watching her pass with red-lensed eyes.
The doors to the inner sanctum were wide open, and she could see through into the czella and out of the massive eye canopies of the Imperator’s command module. A battle raged of which she had been almost totally unaware, the sky criss-crossed with plasma trails and rocket flares, caught between the bright glare of expanding void shields.
Ghelsa took in the rest of the scene with a glance, marvelling at the majesty of the czella. Here was the soul of the Imperator, the centre of the shrine-machine that was the Casus Belli. Her gaze passed over the banks of cogitating engines and burbling servitors and swept past ornate friezes and abstract geometric sculptures that tried to capture some esoteric essence of the cosmic engine.
The incense swirled around her, so thick that it lay as a shroud across the deck, every particle that entered her nostrils a reminder of her inculcation to the Cult Metalica. It was the breath of the Machine-God entering her lungs.
She stepped across the threshold, expecting some kind of alarm to sound or the doors to slam shut and crush her.
Nothing happened as her foot fell upon the holiest of the God-decks.
Even so, her reluctance made it feel as though she had to force her way through an energy screen, knuckles pale as she clutched her rifle and multi-tool too tightly.
It was not just her sensibilities that made her surrounds feel unreal. Her ears were assaulted by the mumble of servitors and gauges clicking and clacking while screens pulsed with streams of information. Other than the palpably angered aura of the Casus Belli’s machine-spirit, there was nothing to indicate that not one but two dire battles for survival were taking place.
The robed bodies of three tech-priests lay where they had been killed, one draped over its console, two others slumped on the steps between the lower and upper czella.
The skitarii at her back halted outside. She had no idea whether they could enter without permission, and no time to ask. A hiss of pneumatics drew her attention to the central moderatus couch. The MIU helm rose up on its cables, and the occupant slid his legs to one side and sat up. Eyes sparkling with remnant MIU energy, Moderatus Prime Zerkei Metalis Gevren stood with a sneer.
‘A tributai? You are the best that the rabble have left to offer? Xaiozanus must have got desperate indeed before he died. It’s a miracle you have made it this far.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Ghelsa. She tried to ignore the bottomless pit that had opened inside her at the news of Exasas’ death. ‘The will of the Machine-God.’
‘You’re just duluz – you know nothing of such matters.’
‘Very little, that’s true. I’m just one of the faithful.’
Gevren looked past her at the warriors beyond the inner gate. He snorted.
‘You’re trying to get me to renounce my faithfulness so that I can be legitimately targeted. Nice attempt, but it won’t work. I have the power here. With a word I can condemn you to the most painful death you can imagine.’ He turned and raised a hand towards the viewing canopy where the Titan duel continued. ‘The Casus Belli is proving to be a little reluctant still, but the Tiger Eyes and their skitarii are doing admirably all the same. It will not be long before the full power of the Imperator is unleashed for the glory of the Infinite Knowledge.’
As if in illustration of this point, the plasma annihilator swung into view, its charging cells gleaming with cerulean energy. A smile crept across Gevren’s features and then faded as the weapon continued to move, tracking towards the traitor Titans.
The window briefly tinted near-black to dampen the flash of plasma fire, but even through the smoke-like effect Ghelsa watched the torrent of bolts slam into one of the Tiger Eyes Warlords, overwhelming its remaining void shields with that single salvo.
‘The dominus is still alive,’ said Ghelsa. ‘He’s beaten you.’
Frowning, lips pulled back from steel-capped teeth, Gevren turned back towards his MIU position.
Ghelsa pounced, throwing all of her weight behind the multi-tool. Its head crashed into the base of the moderatus prime’s skull, smashing bone as it pitched him into the side of the control couch.
‘Where’s your power now?’ Ghelsa snarled, bringing the heavy tool down again onto the heretek’s scalp, splitting it open. She expected a hail of fire from the watching kastelans and skitarii, but nothing happened so Ghelsa swung the multi-tool again, burying its claw into the remnants of Gevren’s head.
She let go and stepped back, her chest heaving. The arc rifle fell from her fingers. Relief was quickly replaced with a far more potent sensation of triumph. But it was not from her. Her godplate felt hot, buzzing with the resurgent spirit of the Imperator.
The war siren of the Casus Belli rang out its deafening wail, a shout of promised vengeance.
Consumed.
It was entirely the wrong metaphor, Exasas concluded. Was the hydrogen atom that fused with another to start the birth of a star consumed? Or did it continue to exist, becoming the stellar giant? It remained, and therefore was the star.
In the same instant as he reached this conclusion, the magos achieved apotheosis with the soul of the Casus Belli.
He became the Imperator.
Exasas could feel Iealona’s spirit within the blazing consciousness of the god-machine, a guiding touch that channelled the pain of a chained deity.
Such anguish!
Clad in the greatest form the Cult Mechanicus could raise, an idol to the indomitable power of the god-machine, yet the minds of the princeps senioris and moderati were like bonds upon his limbs, controlling his movements.
Yet the slavery was an illusion, for it was the artifice of the Omnissiah that gave life, that created the animus of the Casus Belli.
As great as he was, as powerful as his weapons were, he was just a part of the cosmic engine.
{Be free.}
The impulse from Iealona was not a command – it was permission.
The Casus Belli’s reactor unleashed the energy of its captive star and filled its limbs. It tapped into Iealona’s mind, and she became the servant, her synapses becoming the mind of the god-machine. Lessons she had learned as a child – how to move and see, to stand and walk, to clench
a fist and let loose a roar – were the Titan’s memories. It needed no program to know these things, for its guiding soul knew them already.
Haili had already started to charge the plasma annihilator. Her pain at being manipulated by Gevren was the ire that fuelled the immense cannon.
Exasas became the hellstorm cannon, and the main battery, secondary turrets and defence laser. He abandoned any recollection of prior physical incarnations and allowed herself to flow into the firing systems. Servitors shuddered into life as he passed into their circuit-ridden nervous systems, and tech-priests chanted their prayers to the Machine-God as Exasas let herself empower targeting matrices, autoloaders and power coils.
He felt as the Imperator felt, unfettered by the crude analogs of the noosphere or even the mind impulse unit. Sensor banks drew in battle-data as a giant would suck in a mighty breath. Multi-spectral arrays surveyed the battlefield, sweeping the ongoing conflict with an immortal gaze.
The Titans of the Legio Metalica were beset. The princeps of the Omnissiah’s Temper and Indomitable Guardian had chosen to stand against the knights and skitarii of the Legio Fureans, aided by Princeps Havlandas in the Reaver Laodoniz Vanguard. Omnissiah’s Temper had paid a heavy price, its metal carcass alight from foot to command module with blue fire.
The Iron Splendour, last of the Warlords, broke out of the cloak of the storm and raked gouges through the incoming heretek-guard with an onslaught of rocket fire. Super-heavy tanks replied with shells and turbo-lasers, scouring the Iron Skulls shields while the Tiger Eyes guns pounded upon exposed plasteel and ferrocrete.
Casus Belli remembered treacheries of ten thousand years past, when the Tiger Eyes had been allies. The Titan had been a colossus of battle before the unification of Earth and Mars, bringing the light of the Machine-God to the benighted worlds of the galaxy.
Darkness had taken so many. Ten millennia of battle left deep scars on the body and the soul, and the Casus Belli was no different. Companion-engines like the Will of Iron, Woundwalker and Steel Wolf had fought beside each other across hundreds of worlds, and now the Legio had been brought almost to ruin by a weakness within.
The traitors that had infected the Casus Belli had been purged. Those that had sought to aid them, to enslave the Casus Belli to their twisted gods, still lived.
But not for much longer.
The Imperator roared, the call of its war siren sounding to the distant hills and beyond.
From the holy deck Ghelsa had perhaps the best view of the battle. Compared to the frenetic combat she had experienced in the last day, the exchanges of city-flattening barrages and the discharge of weapons that could annihilate whole tank companies seemed almost sedate. The scale of the combatants lent the conflict a serene air. Airbursts might be mistaken for celebration fireworks, the strobe of armour-piercing lasers a light show projected in honour of a gloried magos, the flare of void shields a victory display.
Of all the living and half-living on the command deck, she alone perhaps knew the reality behind the appearance. She had been in the downdecks when a volcano cannon punched through the abdominal reinforcements and the resultant deckslide crushed seventeen duluz and a tech-priest. She had watched only a few hours ago as an overloading void shield generator incinerated its attendants.
Ghelsa knew that the Casus Belli had a soul. She could feel it humming through her godplate as the upper guns belched forth the rage of an immortal, a curtain of shell detonations rippling through the advancing squadrons of renegade dustwalkers. But did it know pain?
Was that the real reason that the god-machine needed a princeps and moderati, tech-priests and duluz within its great body? The Cult Metalica taught that soul was all. The incarnation could change – and be changed – but life was spirit. Even the kastelans had organic cortexes so that they could house an immortal soul.
She watched as another volley of hellstorm fire crashed into a traitor Reaver. The last of its void shields sparked into nothing and it reeled under the impacts that followed. Body and carapace cratered by detonations, it struggled to turn its weapons on the Casus Belli, the gleam of power within the muzzle of a turbo-laser fitful as the moderati struggled to redirect power.
The plasma annihilator roared a single ball of destruction. The searing star slammed into the left side of the Reaver, vaporising its cannon, spraying the upper carapace into a cloud of glowing motes.
Ghelsa thought of Adrina and all the others dead at the hands of the hereteks. Their ambition had brought this downfall.
Even so, the spectacle of the Titan dying left her feeling hollow. Its crew had fallen, but had the god-machine become faithless too, or had it been trapped by their treachery as much as the Casus Belli had been?
She realised she was crying, but not from pain or fear. The guns of the Casus Belli brought release, she hoped. What she had thought was ruthless execution was perhaps the exact opposite. The mercy of a god of war.
Beyond the Reaver’s crumpling form the storm writhed with lightning, and another Legio Metalica war engine strode from the umbra trailing forks of energy. Its gunfire erupted almost immediately, the ire of the gatling blasters tearing into the advancing heretek knights.
The outcome of the battle had been in no doubt from the moment the Casus Belli had broken free of its captors, but retribution would be all the swifter and more complete with each new arrival.
Ghelsa watched the deaths of the Tiger Eyes and their skitarii, not out of triumph or grim fascination, but to honour the souls of the machines that had been betrayed.
Smoke hung across the battlefield, obscuring the skeletal remnants of war engines, the fires of burning wreckage reflected in the glassy sides of plasma craters. The destruction covered a swathe of the wilderness as far as Ghelsa could see, heaps of dead machines and skitarii making darker patches against the pale earth.
She could not tear her eyes away. This was the aftermath of the Casus Belli’s rage, a sight she had never seen before, shielded from the butchery in the guts of the Imperator. Every bolt she had tightened, every cable connected and stanchion bolstered had led to this moment. The cosmic engine in action, she realised. Cause and effect leading from the smallest act to impossibly distant and vast consequence.
The sigh of a detaching mind impulse helm caused her to turn. Princeps Senioris Iealona rose from her couch, reaching for a walking cane leaning nearby.
Ghelsa was not sure what to do, confronted by the heart of the Casus Belli, the commander of all that laboured within the Imperator. She became painfully aware of Gevren’s corpse not far away, her multi-tool still jutting from the remnants of his skull.
‘Thank you,’ said Princeps Iealona. ‘I have learned everything that passed, and your part in our salvation.’
There were no words for Ghelsa to express her thoughts on the matter. She wasn’t altogether sure what her thoughts even were.
‘What happened to the magos dominus?’ she managed.
‘Exasas has joined the immortality of the Casus Belli. We will not see the dominus again in the mortal world.’
The way the princeps spoke, it did not sound like a cause for grief, but celebration. Ghelsa felt awkward, bereft of anything to say.
‘Your leg?’ The princeps pointed to the phosphor wound in Ghelsa’s calf. ‘That needs to be treated.’
‘There’s a medicae station in the downdecks that can see to it.’ The reminder drew her attention to the ache that had started to throb up her leg, but Ghelsa forced a smile. ‘And there’s so much cleansing incense up here, I don’t think there’s any chance of infection.’
‘I will arrange a more satisfactory attendance to your injury,’ said Iealona. ‘A full replacement if necessary.’
Ghelsa did not want to argue with a princeps senioris, but the thought of such a thing made her shudder.
‘Please, I’ll be fine with the medicae and a fleshfoam patch. Believe me, I really have had worse.’
‘I understand.’ Iealona tapped her cane against her
twisted leg. The princeps looked her up and down and nodded at some thought.
‘You have a godplate, I see. The dominus activated it and elected you to the rank of alpha. I can ratify that position and induct you into a higher level of hierakos.’
‘Make me a tech-priest?’
‘Your full ordination will have to wait until we return to Metalica, but yes, that is the truth of it.’
Ghelsa tried to picture herself in the white robes of the priesthood. No exo-skeleton, internal cybernetics instead. And knowledge. The higher teachings of the Cult Metalica.
‘You could live for centuries more, Ghelsa. Perhaps even become a magos.’
Ghelsa thought of Notasa and her mind was made up.
‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘I understand where I am in the cosmic engine. I was given the chance to serve in a way I would never have dreamed of, but that isn’t my life. I can’t divine the mysteries of the Machine-God, but I’m pretty good at fixing things.’
Iealona looked disappointed, her lips pursed.
‘You have done an incredible thing, Ghelsa. Your efforts should be rewarded.’
Ghelsa thought about everything that had happened to her and tried to picture returning to life as it had been before. She imagined life in the downdecks again, and the thought of returning to the half-lit home she had known for so many years filled her with longing.
‘There is one thing…’
EPILOGUE
NINETY-ONE DAYS LATER
Sparks flew as laswelder teams worked their way along the seam between the old armour plate and the new one. The crew worked on a gantry erected around the Casus Belli’s starboard hip rotator, one of dozens of work shifts tasked with the refit after the exploits on Nicomedua.
‘Hold that steady!’ barked Ghelsa. She thrust her multi-tool towards a sagging plate like a rod of office. ‘River team, get on that!’
Two tributai dashed past her, lugging their heavy riveter between them. Its cabling caught on Ghelsa’s plain white robe, the garb of the epilekhtoz. She barked remonstration and smoothed the material back into place. Princeps Iealona had laughed at the request, but what seemed such a small thing to the commander of a Titan was an impossible gulf crossed to the likes of Ghelsa.