by Guy Haley
‘Codes accepted,’ said the voice. ‘Commencing main series activation sequence.’
The twenty small doors in the walls opened downwards. Behind each was a lit armourglass tank containing a severed human head bathed in clear yellow nutrient fluids. Metal neatly capped each neck. From these issued small bundles of tidy cables and pipes that curled downwards under the heads, then up into the machines above them.
‘Activation code required,’ said the voice.
This time, there was no null-sound cone. The code sent astropathically to Losenti by Cawl to turn on his abominable machine was different every time, and there was no need to rob the primarch of his hearing. Cawl made a virtue of economy in all things he did.
‘Charnibel crow, white crow, white crow, white crow, charnibel crow, black crow,’ said Losenti.
‘Code accepted. Code accepted. Code accepted,’ said the machine. ‘Stand by for communion. Cawl Inferior awakening rite underway. Stand by for communion.’
Machines hidden behind the panelling surged into life. The chug of the devices below them grew more muted, ceding space to the waking voices of the others. Thin lines in the metal walls, invisible before, glowed with sluggish, golden energies. Circuitry engraved into the tanks’ glass glimmered similarly, and the faces of the heads twitched. Guilliman was absorbed by the jerking of their muscles. The weight pressing onto his psyche grew.
Losenti grimaced at the primarch. ‘I ask your leave to depart, primarch,’ he said. ‘The awakened machine’s presence is uncomfortable for me.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Guilliman. He tore his eyes away from the severed heads. ‘Please. You do not need to ask my permission. We have done this many times. I know how much the Cawl Inferior pains you when active.’
Losenti gave a slight, grateful bow, tugged up his hood and walked back towards his perpetually dark quarters.
‘Losenti!’ called Guilliman on a whim, raising his voice over the smooth thumping of the machine. Losenti paused at the threshold of his door. ‘What do you do down here, when you are not needed, when you are alone?’
Losenti turned his head. His wrinkled face was bathed in the warm light of Cawl’s device. ‘I write poetry,’ he said. ‘And I dream of better times.’
The doors slid shut behind him, leaving Guilliman alone in the chamber of the Cawl Inferior.
Guilliman lacked the psychic potential that His father had granted to several of his brothers, but he was a child of the Emperor’s making, and he was sensitive to psychic energies of which a true non-psyker would be ignorant. Some hidden part of the world changed. Energy ran more freely around the channels engraved into the walls, extending its web outwards from the heads until the whole room was a tracery of golden lambency. The yellow light outshone the ruddy light of the machine hall under the floor and the bright lumens overhead. As the energy network expanded, it hit upon hidden signs in the fabric of the room. Warding runes in the secret techno-arcana tongue of Magos Psykana blazed brightly, along with others of obvious alien origin. Cawl was a magpie magos, taking what he needed no matter its ancestry. His free thinking made Guilliman profoundly uneasy, but a labour ten thousand years long, delivered perfectly, attested to the archmagos’ efficacy. He had been instrumental in restoring Guilliman to life in this terrible age. And, most amazingly, in creating the Primaris Space Marines, Cawl had improved upon the Emperor’s own designs.
I have no choice but to trust him, thought Guilliman. That’s the only practical I need consider here.
As the light grew, the constant, hollow pain in Guilliman’s chest intensified, as if the two were inextricably linked. He gritted his teeth as the gnawing in his gut outdid the pressure in his head. The muscle twitches in the tanks became a frenzy of gurning. The heads jerked and jiggled, mouths gaping in silent, drowned screams. Bubbles streamed over clay flesh, agitating the surface of the fluids that nourished them. Eyelids fluttered over eyes that appeared, just for a second, to contain some shred of native intelligence, and they looked out from their watery prisons with absolute horror.
Pressure built at the back of Guilliman’s mind until his eyes throbbed. The air smelled of hot steel, and his saliva took on a metallic flavour. The emptiness his soul contained expanded beyond the physical confines of his body.
There was a definite pop, not generated by the machines he was certain, and suddenly all was still. The thumping of the hidden devices levelled out to a quiet whir. The faces ceased their pained contortions. Their eyes went blank and closed. The bubbling ceased.
Guilliman waited. The pains the machine brought did not decrease, but familiarity made them bearable. There was a clunk, a hiss, then the eyes opened again, and a fresh machine voice spoke: the emotionless coppery burr of Archmagos Belisarius Cawl.
‘Greetings Lord Primarch, Lord Commander, Lord Imperial Regent. The Lord Guilliman of the High Twelve.’
The mouths of the heads gaped clumsily, silently parroting the machine voice’s words.
‘That last title has no meaning,’ said Guilliman.
‘For a millennium, your name was an honorific for weaker men. By the conventions of those times, you are the Lord Guilliman,’ said the Cawl Inferior. Guilliman had no idea whether the machine was mocking him or working its way down some dead-end logical path. ‘Redundant repetition. Your resumption of the original title is illogical. The position of Lord Militant was banned in the wake of the great War of the Beast.’
Guilliman knew little of that conflict or of the infamous Beheading that followed. The near destruction of the Imperium had passed Cawl by. The archmagos had been deep in his studies of the Emperor’s fragmentary research notes, and therefore his records of it were maddeningly brief. Most of the histories appertaining to it had been deliberately destroyed.
‘Your recreation of the position lacks wisdom. The position of Lord Commander is similar in title to that of Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum. It has a fifty per cent match with that of Lord Commander of the Segmentum Solar. Inefficiency can arise by duplication of titles. Confusion is inevitable. I prefer Imperial Regent. No other can lay claim to the wording of this honour.’
‘I am more than a title,’ said Guilliman. ‘Every time we speak, Cawl, you bring this up.’
‘I am not Cawl. I simulate Cawl. Familiar complaints act as social bonds between members of the human species. I seek to emulate this interaction to make you comfortable with my aberrant existence. This preamble is to ease tension and re-establish bonds between Belisarius Cawl and Roboute Guilliman.’
‘You make poor conversation, machine. Deliver your report.’
Cawl had lived ten thousand years. Such a great span of time would wear out all but the greatest of souls. The changes he had wrought upon his body to support his mind through it had stripped most of his humanity away. His emotions had become ghosts in the great mechanism his mind now inhabited, and here, mediated through the Cawl Inferior, they should have been practically absent. But Guilliman could never shake the feeling of intense superiority hidden in Cawl’s emotionless pronouncements, nor ignore the touch of sardonic humour that revealed itself from time to time, even in this soulless facsimile.
‘It is not the report of the Cawl Inferior. It is Archmagos Belisarius Cawl’s report.’
‘It is easy to forget,’ said Guilliman, ‘that you are a mechanism, and that such large amounts of information can be conveyed by such simple encoded messages.’
‘The information does not come from the message. The information is innate to my construction. The code unlocks the appropriate response. My creator supplied me multiple likely scenarios that he, in his great wisdom and genius, mathematically extrapolated. The messages I receive merely modify these prognostications to fit the actuality of current circumstances. My programming is pre-loaded. These linked brains and the logic engines in the greater portion of this chamber contain all eventualities releva
nt to the tasks undertaken by Lord Roboute Guilliman and Archmagos Belisarius Cawl. All probable futures are within me.’
Guilliman looked around at the heads. They were too individual to have come from vat-born slaves, and there was no sign of the penal coding tattoos worn by servitors drawn from criminal stock. He did not want to know where Cawl had sourced his grisly collection.
‘I am impressed, as always, Cawl Inferior,’ he said. This was also a conversation they had had many times before.
The machine’s voice changed, becoming hectoring. ‘Then my master repeats his request that you install him as Fabricator General of Mars. You replaced five of the High Twelve upon assumption of the regency of the Imperium, and hundreds of the lesser high lords. You have done this several times since. What is one more?’
‘For the hundredth time, I will not do this. The Imperium does not exert so much control over Mars that I may appoint my own Fabricator General, and they would never accept you even if I could. The tenets of your creed forbid such artificial consciousnesses as this. Your experiments–’
‘Archmagos Belisarius Cawl’s experiments, not my experiments,’ said the machine pedantically.
‘Very well,’ conceded Guilliman. ‘Cawl’s experiments have made him many enemies.’
‘The detail is open to interpretation,’ said the machine. ‘Take this unit, for example. I am no abominable intelligence as your attitude implies you believe me to be. My responses are not spontaneously generated, but predetermined. The servitors that make up my being are sanctioned for use. They are not machines, and what they generate – me, the Cawl Inferior – is not a unique creation but a limited expression of Archmagos Belisarius Cawl’s mind. By these means, I am free of the wickedness of forbidden sentience.
‘Archmagos Belisarius Cawl is a genius. Consider this unit further. The hexidecimal encoding that he projects to this unit is immune to decryption, for it is incomplete. My responses are inherent to this unit’s cogitators. An astropathic message can be intercepted, no matter how many locks are put upon it. Anything that uses the electromagnetic spectrum is worse. Not only can it degrade, or be captured, or be lost, but the journey of a message from where Cawl is now to where you are would take three thousand Terran years. Expediency is the enemy of dogma. You have asked him to be expeditious. He alone has been able to unlock, understand and improve upon the work of the Emperor. He alone is the master of a hundred fields of technology. He alone is unafraid of innovation. He is the best candidate to rule Mars. I present his petition to you. Give Archmagos Belisarius Cawl Mars, and he will hand you the galaxy.’
Guilliman had of course considered doing exactly this, but he did not lie to the Cawl Inferior. The result could be outright civil war in the Adeptus Mechanicus’ sub-empire of forge worlds.
‘Your colleagues would disagree with your evaluation,’ he said. ‘It cannot be done.’
‘I have no colleagues.’
‘His colleagues then.’
‘His colleagues are limited. Their beliefs have become a faith that they dare not challenge. The Adeptus Mechanicus is far more trammelled in its thinking than the Mechanicum of your time was, my Lord Guilliman, and the archmagos was a radical in those distant centuries. You would not have come to him if he were not. Already you have asked him to perform many forbidden duties. You are as culpable as he in any crime that may or may not have taken place.’
‘I am no adherent of the Machine-God’s creed,’ said Guilliman.
‘You have asked the archmagos to interfere with technologies expressly forbidden by your own creator, the Emperor of Mankind.’
The machine waited expectantly, far too lifelike for a supposedly lifeless machine.
Guilliman did not believe it was free of will. There had been in Guilliman’s youth a device called the Thracian Automaton. Fashioned in the semblance of a man, the machine had played at regicide with any who would challenge it, and won every game. Questions could be put to it on matters of science and history, and the answers it gave were unerringly accurate. Konor, Guilliman’s adoptive father, had taken the boy primarch to see this marvel. Guilliman had seen through it immediately, and challenged its creator. The man had insisted that it worked from the old sciences, showing the consul and his adopted son complicated workings within the figure, but Guilliman would not be convinced, and he had leapt forwards and torn loose the mannequin. Inside the stool it sat upon was a very real, if rather short, man.
The man had proved to be a marvellous polymath, if a cheat, and he had spent many years serving Guilliman’s foster father.
The Thracian Automaton had been a powerful lesson. It was probable that the Cawl Inferior was an inverse of that device: a real machine intelligence masquerading as a pretence. Guilliman was no technologist of the ability his brothers Perturabo, Vulkan or Ferrus Manus had been, but he doubted that the archmagos was telling him the complete truth about how the machinery worked. It was clearly partly psychic in nature, a blend of various xenos and Imperial technologies, which made it heretical by the tenets of the Adeptus Mechanicus in several regards, whether it could think or not.
‘The final answer is no, as it is every time,’ said Guilliman.
The machine clicked deep in its cybernetic innards, filing the response for later broadcast to Cawl.
‘Give me Cawl’s report,’ commanded Guilliman.
‘The Conclave Acquisitorius proceeds through the galaxy. Cawl has recently finished war operations on Cadmus Phosp. Unfortunately, the pylons discovered there are too degraded to be reactivated, and so he must begin his quest anew.’
‘So he cannot yet reproduce the technology.’
‘Regrettably, not yet. Not on the scale necessary for your ends, my lord.’ The slack mouths of the heads continued their jerky aping of the machine’s voice. ‘Archmagos Cawl has formulated a number of smaller experimental devices that project a similar effect to the xenos originals, albeit to a lesser degree. He has provided several to seal the Pit of Raukos. They will arrive soon.’
‘I am aware of this. That is why we are here. That is why the battle for Raukos was fought.’
‘Forgive me, my lord, I can say only what my cogitators select as the most appropriate response according to Cawl’s code,’ said the machine. Was this a lie, or a genuine artefact of how the machine worked? Cawl obfuscated everything.
‘Will the devices work?’
‘They will be staples in a wound. Cawl does not yet understand how the pylons function completely, but the actions of the test devices here will further his research. Eventually, he will be able to replicate the technology, and he shall bring the Rift under control, parsec by parsec, until the Great Rift is at last sealed. This he swears, my lord. He shall dedicate the remainder of his life to it.’
Guilliman scratched his face thoughtfully. His chin was stubbly. He had neglected his personal grooming these last few days. ‘Encouraging words.’
‘I am instructed to offer a cautionary note, my lord,’ replied the machine. ‘The culmination of this research is a long way off. Nevertheless, now Archmagos Belisarius Cawl has fulfilled his oaths to you and delivered the Primaris Space Marines as commanded, he has more available cogitation power to put to this task. The principle of the pylons is sound. The technology is proven. With what little remained of the pylon network around Cadia, he came close to sealing the Eye of Terror. He will not give up now.
‘The devices that are en route to 108/Beta-Kalapus-9.2 are untested. They may be unstable. They may work for a while before failing. They may not work at all. They are inferior to the technologies of the necrons in every way. Our understanding of metaphysical science is hopeless compared to theirs.’ The Cawl Inferior uttered the blasphemy as easily as it might bid good day. The idea that alien technology was in any way superior to that of humanity was anathema to the machine cult. ‘Without testing, Archmagos Belisarius Cawl cannot be sure of the effi
cacy of their design. With time, and should the Conclave Acquisitorius be successful in its quest to find an intact planetary pylon network, he will be able to refine the design.’
‘If these designs do work, surely we can make use of them now,’ said Guilliman. ‘Assuming Cawl’s pylons are functional, how long will it be before we can establish stable corridors to the Imperium Nihilus? That is a matter of pressing concern.’
‘Decades, at least,’ said the machine. ‘Possibly centuries. This trial will better inform Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, and he will better inform you, my Lord Guilliman. But Belisarius Cawl will triumph. The ancient races held the answers: the Old Ones, the necrons, the aeldari. Soon we shall hold all the pieces to the puzzle that they held only in part. We shall fit them together. We shall succeed where they failed, and overcome the monsters spawned by our own minds.’
Again, there was a flash of emotion in the Cawl Inferior’s words, that of determination and anger. The technologies that sustained it hummed.
‘Trafficking with xenos. The usage of forbidden technology. Your peers in the Cult Mechanicus will not take kindly to this.’
‘I predict their response will be nothing short of furious, my lord regent. They hate Belisarius Cawl. Envy motivates them if they knew the extent to which his knowledge outreaches theirs, some would move to destroy him and his creations. I trust you will shelter me should the time come.’
Guilliman laughed. He did not laugh often now, and when he did it was sorrowful. ‘The Cawl Inferior, you betray your disguise. You wish for protection as a living being would.’
‘I require it. I do not desire or not desire it. My continued existence is necessary. If Cawl dies, the sum total of his knowledge exists within me. That is why I must live. If he dies, you will at least have me. Archmagos Belisarius Cawl can protect himself. I cannot.’
‘Archmagos Cawl is the last being I know who needs protection from anybody,’ agreed Guilliman. ‘And you are safe here in the bowels of the Macragge’s Honour. Now, the Primaris Space Marines. We have a century of data. How are they performing?’